The Americans

The Americans is an American period spy drama television series created by Joe Weisberg for FX. It aired for six seasons from January 30, 2013, to May 30, 2018. Weisberg and Joel Fields also served as showrunners and executive producers. Set during the Cold War, the show follows Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two Soviet KGB intelligence officers posing as an American married couple living in Falls Church, a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. The couple combine their spying duties with raising their American-born children Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati).

The Americans also explores the conflict between Washington's FBI office and the KGB Rezidentura there, from the perspectives of agents on both sides, including the Jenningses' neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent working in counterintelligence. The series begins in the aftermath of the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in January 1981 and concludes in December 1987, shortly before the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

The show's themes of marriage, identity, and parenthood were structured around the metaphorical connection between the Cold War and the Jenningses' marriage. The Americans was acclaimed by critics, many of whom considered it among the best television shows of its era; its writing, characters, and acting were often singled out. The series's final season earned Rhys the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, while Weisberg and Fields won Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series; it also received the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Drama. Margo Martindale twice won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her performances in the third and fourth seasons. It was one of the rare drama shows to receive two Peabody Awards during its run. It has since been named one of the greatest television series of all time.

The surnames of most of the Russian characters are not revealed. In scenes in the Soviet embassy, the characters address each other in a familiar but respectful manner, using given name and patronymic, without mentioning surnames (for example, "Ivanovich" means "son of Ivan" and "Sergeevna" means "daughter of Sergei").

The Americans, a period piece set during the Reagan administration, was outlined by series creator Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer. The series focuses on the personal and professional lives of the Jennings family—a married couple of Soviet deep-cover agents placed in the Washington, D.C. area in the 1960s and their initially unsuspecting, American-born children. The story picks up in the early 1980s. The show's creator has described the series as being focused on the personal, despite its political content: "International relations is just an allegory for the human relations. Sometimes, when you're struggling in your marriage or with your kid, it feels like life or death. For Philip and Elizabeth, it often is." Joel Fields, the other executive producer, described the series as working different levels of reality: the fictional world of the marriage between Philip and Elizabeth, and the real world involving the characters' experiences during the Cold War.

In 2007, after leaving the CIA, Weisberg published An Ordinary Spy, a novel about a spy who is completing the final stages of his training in Virginia and is being transferred overseas. After reading Weisberg's novel, executive producer Graham Yost discovered that Weisberg had also written a pilot for a possible spy series. Yost read the pilot and discovered that it was "annoyingly good", which led to developing the show.

Weisberg says the CIA inadvertently gave him the idea for a series about spies, explaining, "While I was taking the polygraph exam to get in, they asked the question, 'Are you joining the CIA in order to gain experience about the intelligence community so that you can write about it later'—which had never occurred to me. I was totally joining the CIA because I wanted to be a spy. But the second they asked that question ... then I thought, 'Now I'm going to fail the test.'" The job at the CIA, which Weisberg later described as a mistake, has helped him develop several storylines in the series, basing some plot lines on real-life stories. He stated:

The most interesting thing I observed during my time at the CIA was the family life of agents who served abroad with kids and spouses. The reality is that mostly they're just people going about their lives. The job is one element, and trying to depict the issues they face just seemed like something that, if we could bring it to television in a realistic way, would be new.