McAvoy: The Americans Is A Spy Drama For A Cynical Age

FX's drama The Americans has almost wrapped up its first season, and I think it's clear to anyone who was alive during the Cold War why the show is on now. Given the anarchic nature of this country's current enemy, Islamic fundamentalists, it's easy to be nostalgic for a time when America's greatest foe at least followed a comprehensible code. Say what you will about the Soviets -- I certainly did, in the '80s, and intermittently during the '90s...right up to 9/11, I suppose, if you ask my friends -- but at least you knew you could find them at a legitimate Embassy.

The Americans has all the trappings of a premium cable drama -- high production values, occasional profanity, thoughtful attention paid to complex, ambiguous issues. And yet, as much as I have tried to turn off my critical faculties and natural patriotism, something about The Americans puts me off.

The problem is this: the protagonists are spies. Soviet spies. And they're our "heroes." Watching The Americans requires the viewer to get emotionally invested in and, indeed, to root for characters who are explicitly enemies of this country. The latest episode tells the supposedly tragic story of an African-American man recruited to the Communist cause via the civil rights movement of the '60s -- and when he runs into trouble, gets threatened by his handlers with expatriation to Moscow, and commits suicide-by-cop instead, we're supposed to feel sad about it! But I love this country. I love it so much that even though I know Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are fictional, the fact that their activities were almost certainly performed by real people not so very long ago makes me, whenever I watch an episode, want to call the FBI on myself for abetting them.

It's not that the world of spies isn't a fascinating setting for a TV drama: superlative series from Scarecrow And Mrs. King to Acapulco H.E.A.T. have taught us that. And I don't even object to the historical setting; knowing exactly how events are actually going to play out gives the viewer a pleasantly smug feeling of superiority to the characters. But why not go back even further, and to a time when the stakes were even higher? Why not make a TV series about the spies that helped to free our 18th-century forefathers from British tyranny?

I can hear your objections: once you move the action to a historically remote setting, you lose dramatic potential due to the amount of exposition required to bring the average viewer up to speed. And when actual fights (either gunfights or hand-to-hand combat) are almost completely subtracted from the action, the show would have to rest, in large part, on abstract concepts like Injustice and Honor. In a post-24 world, it might be difficult for a contemporary audience to fathom what a horror it would be for, let's say, a basically innocent man to be forced to vacate a flimsy charge (with a serious sentence) by taking a public loyalty oath -- a real punishment in pre-Revolutionary America.

To me, that kind of betrayal, of country and self, would have massive dramatic effect. What am I if I am not as good as my word? How far would I go to defend my home in the face of oppressive occupation? And how would I balance these concerns against the needs of my family, all the while facing more tangible challenges like, for instance, parasites ruining my cabbage crop?

Yes, I realize that Jack Bauer probably would have pledged an oath to anyone, anywhere, if it meant that his wife wouldn't get killed by a CTU mole (eleven-year-old spoiler alert!), so my hypothetical protagonist's difficulties -- in this hypothetical case, pledging false allegiance to Britain -- would pale in comparison given what we're used to seeing in our TV spy dramas. But if any of us wouldn't blink at publicly affirming any old lies if all it costs is our honor, that just means we live in a fallen world. Or rather, we are all only as honorable as our most venal citizen. If Kim Jong-Un comes through the ACN offices and demands my loyalty on pain of death, then I guess Dear Leader's storm troopers will take me out, while most of my staff of probable turncoats watches their dear leader breathe his last, for freedom. Like me, the American colonists who bravely undertook the democratic project held themselves to a higher standard. And if a TV series portrayed their courageous struggle week after week, perhaps we might hold ourselves to just such a standard, too, and aspire to be more than we are.

All that said...I suppose I can swallow my misgivings about The Americans if it means I'll get to see more of Keri Russell's behind. I'd like to smack that until it's as red as the Soviet flag. Just don't tell my fiancée.