Americans

Loosely based on the KGB's real Cold War practice of planting undercover agents in American life, the FX series The Americans (2013 to 2018) follows Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, Soviet operatives who pass as ordinary travel agents in suburban Virginia. Matthew Rhys and Kerri Russell play the couple.

This study looks at how the show braids espionage and violence together with domestic drama, building its plots around marriage, romance, a close male friendship, and family life. Linda Mizejewski pays particular attention to the series' women, who step outside the femme fatale type familiar from spy fiction, to its troubled men, and to its children, who are both victims and active participants in the story.

A central question the book raises is whose side viewers take: the American agents hunting the Jennings, or the Jennings themselves, whose private lives draw sympathy even as they work to undermine the United States. Mizejewski reads the show's recreation of 1980s suburban life as a way of exploring the moral complexity of citizenship and national identity. Drawing on television studies and feminist media theory, she traces the series' mix of espionage violence and household emotion and its use of 1980s pop culture and music. Rather than evoking nostalgia, its period detail raises doubts about how to judge Reagan-era America and the Cold War.

Those doubts, the book argues, coexist with the show's appeal, which rests on an Americanism that the series both criticizes and affirms. The study examines the tensions in how the show handles identity, gender, marriage, and what home means. Written in an accessible style, it is aimed at scholars and students of television, media, genre, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture, as well as dedicated fans who were not ready to see the show end.