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13 June 2013

The Americans is Homeland without the hawks or the hysteria

A thriller with a delicious setup - all credit to ITV for bagging it.

By Rachel Cooke

The Americans
ITV

When the FBI raided the New Jersey home of Vladimir and Lidiya Guryev – also known as Richard and Cynthia Murphy – in 2010, there was widespread amazement among their neighbours. Richard and Cynthia? Russian intelligence agents? Surely not. “They couldn’t have been spies,” one local told the press. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

In The Americans (Saturdays, 10pm), a series vaguely inspired by the arrest of “Richard and Cynthia” (here, we have “Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings”) and eight other Russian operatives, hydrangeas have yet to put in an appearance, blooming or other­-wise. However, we have been treated to the sight of Elizabeth (Keri Russell) delivering a plate of brownies to a family across the street. “Home-made!” she trilled as she handed them over, brownies being almost as important to the American psyche as driving everywhere and super-sizing at the drive-through.

At her side during this important mission and wearing a smile as wide as Texas was her husband, Phillip (Matthew Rhys), who is something of a fan of country music. Moments earlier, we’d seen him at the mall, strutting his stuff in a shoe shop where he was buying cowboy boots.

Boy, you have to hand it to the KGB, don’t you? The curriculum back at HQ must be quite something: how to wear a disguise; how to send secret messages; how to kill your enemies; how to bake brownies and line-dance.

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Still, this is a great series: slick and entertaining. It’s a touch preposterous that an FBI agent just happens to be Elizabeth’s and Phillip’s new neighbour; of all the suburban streets in Washington, he would choose the one where a couple of Soviet spies have been embedded for the past 16 years.

However, it would be churlish to complain about this, given how delicious the setup is. It’s 1981: Fleetwood Mac are on the stereo and Ronald Reagan is in the White House. The spies wear high-waisted jeans and (for her) the garment formerly known as “a body” – a ridiculous, stretchy top pulled tight by means of plastic poppers between the thighs.

I like the central ambiguity of the series – we inevitably find ourselves rooting for the two Russian agents, hoping they won’t be caught – and I love the tension that flows from a marriage in which one partner is far more devoted to the motherland than the other (Phillip periodically flirts with the idea of defection).

The couple’s all-American children, Henry and Paige, know nothing of their parents’ origins, which makes Elizabeth’s ascetic tendencies – she disguises her socialism as a kind of parsimony – rather confusing. “Mom doesn’t like new things,” says Phillip, as if her politics were just a matter of taste.

The flashbacks (I usually dread flashbacks, being fearful of bad wigs) are well done. In the first episode, we saw the two of them in the USSR in the early 1960s having their marriage arranged by a KGB colonel; then we saw them arriving in the US in 1965, Elizabeth still unwilling to sleep with her new husband, despite this being a vital element of the role she had agreed to play (children will be the best disguise of all).

In their motel room – look, air conditioning! – they discussed their first impressions of the satanic US. Already Philip was doubting what his masters had told him. America wasn’t so bad, was it? His wife was unimpressed. “There is a weakness in the people,” she said. “I can feel it.”

How fantastic that it’s the female character who is the true hardliner and thus the one who finds it easier to kidnap, kill and even warn the high-ups in Moscow of Phillip’s deficiencies. And yet they are bonded: by their children, by their exile, by the memory of their youthful political optimism. Who will crack first?

All of this seems much more interesting to me – and much less dubiously freighted – than the saga of Carrie and Brody in Homeland and all credit to ITV for bagging it. (The Americans is made by DreamWorks and has already been recommissioned for a second series.) This is Homeland without the hawks or the hysteria – and much better for it.

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