(Not just a review of the serial)
Simply yonks ago, I was studying drama in South London and attended a class by one of the Three Wise Men (who taught us the history and theory of drama) when the Suspension of Disbelief came up. In case that's a concept you've never come across, I'll outline it in a sentence or two. The idea is that while viewing a performance, an audience sets aside the natural tendency to dismiss what they see as fake; in other words, they let go of their incredulity. According to this theory, the success or failure of the show depends on the extent to which the actors playing Lady Macbeth or James Bond relieve the audience of their common sense. As you can tell from my tone, this concept – even if traces back to Aristotle - bugged me from the start.
Actually, not from the very start, because for a few ticks there I was seduced by Suspension of Disbelief's sophistry. From the actor's point of view, it's comforting to think of an audience as being naturally receptive. They are presumably - in one way or another - paying to watch, and therefore have set themselves up. But what soon gnawed at my confidence in this trick of the footlights was the consequent thought: if true, isn't it all rather condescending? A bit like plonking the kids in front of a Punch and Judy and hoping for the best? Will they give you a rest, or start complaining the puppeteer's bum is sticking out of the booth?
Though I wasn't the first to bolt out of the doubters' stalls, I was in good company. This idea that the skill of puppeteers, magicians, film makers, actors in radio drama, even story tellers is the ability to lull their audience into a suspension of disbelief was challenged during the early twentieth century by – amongst others – Bertholt Brecht and JRR Tolkien. Setting Fantasy Fiction aside, the Theatre of the Absurd, Epic Drama, Agit Prop and the Theatre of Cruelty all had a beef with the so-called Fourth Wall. Fourth Wall. Again, in case you're not familiar with the term, it refers to the frame of a traditional Proscenium Arch Theatre through which the audience sit facing the play. Although the stage is three dimensional, the overall effect is like a picture frame; therefore, whatever the audience sees isn't so very different from watching a film on screen. What Brecht and his contemporaries did was to tear down the arch, stage plays in the round, or anywhere the actors had no place to hide.
It's not only about physical space. Brecht wrote issue based plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle, where the aim was to get the audience to think and – ultimately – to act for themselves. The play is based on the Judgement of Solomon, a moral allegory championing nurture over nature. It was first staged by worker's co-operatives in the aftermath of World War Two; and in many performances the audience are invited to take part, the play itself becoming a sort of collective rite. Actors speak directly to the audience - not through camp “asides” - but slipping in and out of character. Costume changes are done on stage, not in the wings or dressing rooms. Ideally, nothing is hidden, everything is shown and the story is told through its songs and choreography as much as by talking heads mouthing off at each other. Although plays like The Chalk circle were soon being performed in the West by professional theatre groups for the benefit of mostly bourgeois audiences; in their original context, the purpose would have been to inspire a kind of political correctness (for want of a better expression) in both audience and performers alike.
The Fourth Wall is a comfort zone that allows the audience to relax and enjoy the show. If they wanted something else, they could try a lap dancing bar or go and stand on the terraces of a football match. There they could have a stake in the experience without getting preached at or indoctrinated. At the theatre the choice was not between making a fool of themselves or lurking in the shadows. It was between being amused by Agatha Christie, moved by Peter Shafer or challenged for being there at all by Cunning Stunts.
Sorry, it's unfair to presume a familiarity with late twentieth century drama in the UK, So Let me qualify those choices. In this taxonomy, going to an Agatha Christie play is not so different from watching an episode of Father Brown on the BBC. No matter how brilliant or dull the acting, the sets or the script - whodunnits hide in plain sight behind that Fourth Wall with all the vibrancy colour TV had circa 1968. On Shaftesbury Avenue you might get to see the stars of screen in the flesh, and wait at the Stage Door for an autograph. Meantime there's ten metres of solid air between a front seat in the stalls and what goes down on stage; the only two-way exchange is at the end when the actors pull their wigs off and take a bow: you get to applaud, even throw roses.
Another kind of drama engages the conscience or the existential mind. It may be performed in a different sort of theatre building, though not necessarily. It may be epic in scale (like Shafer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun or Equus) and it may be Beckett's Waiting For Godot, staged in the round at an intimate studio theatre. Little might come between the audience and the performers in the free flow of emotion, tears and mirth. There's a sort of handshaking going on, a formal dialogue, even improvised so long as it conforms to a political or at least a social correctness. Brecht and the other absurdists had this effect on established theatre.
With performers such as Cunning Stunts, the audience may be confronted, annoyed or intimidated. A certain amount of convention still prevails, in so far as men who attend feminist events are expected to bear responsibilities that shift the personal onto a collective guilt. This requires silence, and therefore one aspect of Fourth Wall remains intact; but to quote a rather hackneyed phrase, the medium is the message. Just attending the event is a form of political expression, and there is a cumulative affect. Progress means change, and once change has occurred, it's hard to go back. As with the horse that has bolted, there is no use locking the barn door.
The Americans is a US TV show in six series with a total of seventy-five, forty-five minute episodes. That's a staggering amount of viewing: fifty-six hours. To spend so much time reading a book, it would be more than twelve hundred pages, about as long as War and Peace. Given that the subject is Russian spies operating in the USA during the 1980s, alluding to Tolstoy – still Russia's most celebrated author - isn't out of place. But why is downwritefiction suddenly turning to reviewing a TV show? And why has this long article kicked off with over a thousand words on the Suspension of Disbelief in the theatre - when The Americans is delivered over the Internet?
Quite a while back, we looked at Land and Freedom, a film by Ken Loach. That piece of cinema, when I finally allowed myself to watch it, didn't have the same effect as The Americans, though it had a fair smattering of déjà vu moments for me. I examined it because the novel I'd put out on Amazon, MY Heart Forgets To Beat, covered much of the same ground: a young Liverpool man going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. I had to set the record straight and explain why my book and Ken Loach's film were so very different, even though their politics were broadly similar. The motive I have for dealing with The Americans runs even deeper than the two decades spent writing and rewriting MHFTB. Unlike the Spanish Civil War (beginning twenty years before I was born, and in which my mother's cousin Sean Redmond had died) I took an active part in the Cold War. Not as a protagonist, but as an activist I had first hand contact with undercover agents, and Caroline Taylor - a fellow campaigner and friend - got killed in a horrendous, unexplained accident.
OK, The Americans was released on Amazon between 2013 and 2019. I stumbled on Episode One the week before Christmas, believing it to be only a pilot for a series that was never made. I got a shock when the credits rolled up and saw what a massive undertaking it was. Having been riveted (as they say) I was daunted by the prospect of ploughing through the whole deal. And here's where Suspension of Disbelief first came in. From the pilot episode onwards, I had to confront the question: what compels my interest in one piece, while I pass on so many others?
There's also an existential question. Is it so great these days when you can catch up on a show you've missed, instantly do all the fan stuff, look up the stars and crew on IMDb, Google a few context questions... and all the while not having to impose your choice of viewing on the family, watching on your phone or laptop alone in shed or bed?
I dunno. I recently watched Episode Two of Strange Report – in colour, fgs - which I last saw on our old black and white set when it was broadcast in 1969. I was 13 then, and was instantly smitten by Anneke Wills. Now she looks like Miss Jones the infant school teacher, you may look back but never touch. Shuddering thought. (Must have been the onset of puberty as I'd hardly noticed her as the Doctor's assistant.) Why is it - sorry for posing another rhetorical so soon - why do you have to project your own real life onto roles enacted on screen? If you said you never did, I'd say you and whose army! Leastways, I have nothing for anyone who denies it. You are neither Lear nor Cordelia. Lady Macbeth has got your tongue. Jimmy Porter never jumped you in a dark alley. There's not an ounce of Colonel Whatshisface in your father. There's no Betty Bacall on your back seat, no Columbo in your rear mirror.
Come on, I say, we are all Philip Marlowe trying to protect the guilty female. Or else, we are all that damaged human for christsake desperate to avoid the grey knight in the Plymouth coupé. These are the stories we tell ourselves. We can neither take them nor leave them, because there is no universal belief system we have signed up to, that we forever have to acknowledge. There is no Inquisition. The stories that shadow us wherever we go are palpably there whether we like it or not. They are present in a single line from a song, an image that flashes on a billboard, a short phrase overheard on an escalator, and - most pernicious of all - the stab of memory or a vision that's somehow suddenly taken out of its dream context. Though I shake my head at Polanski, I cried when his Oliver set out for London, homeless, friendless, penniless. I cried when I heard Thick As A Brick for the first time in years on a crappy tape machine somewhere in the mountains of Anatolia in 1993. This isn't Suspension of Disbelief. I hardly ever cry, even when things get tough. I didn't cry watching my Mum's funeral on Zoom, or when our babies were born. But I cried when Margaret Thatcher got kicked out of Number Ten, and I cried when I woke up early one morning after a heavy night's drinking and realised Ronald Reagan had his finger on the button.
They talk about catharsis in art. Arion, a Greek from Lesbos, started what we now call drama by staging his verses with music, dance, a single actor and a chorus line. It was entertainment, not pure entertainment because there was a religious side to it. And the roots of drama go back further than Arion telling his own story at the court of the tyrant Periander. I like to think he recreated his rescue by the dolphins as an offering to the gods. In the version of the story I tell myself, he pleaded for the life of the sailors – who may or may not have been guilty of trying to rob and drown him – with this appeal to the King: it may all have been in his mind. By turning experience into a show he expiated the ghosts of his own fears, and saved the sailors from being crucified. Catharsis is what we do with our minds when we try to work through life's experiences. This is not Suspension of Disbelief. Forget the double negative. This is belief.
So, in The Americans, there's this married couple living in Washington who turn out to be what are known as Illegals – undercover KGB agents spying and carrying out assassinations and acts of sabotage while appearing to be law-abiding travel agents living out The American Dream. They are the attractive parents two kids and, under the aegis of the KGB's Department S, they lead multiple double lives. They put on disguises, track down potential victims and either seduce or blackmail them into spying. Bugs are planted, secret documents copied, plans or samples of weapons technology – including nerve agents – stolen, whatever it takes to keep the Soviet Union abreast of the game. They also, from time to time, carry out the cold blooded murder of folk who are a threat to the USSR.
It's the Eighties, the fourth and final decade of the Cold War. Elizabeth and Philip Jennings have already been in America since the mid Sixties, building their fake identities and gradually stepping up the scope of their activities. With the death of the Soviet supremo Brezhnev and the struggles of the reformists under Gorbachev, rivalries within the KGB mean the lines of control get blurred. Also, from time to time, the agents' commitment to the cause of world communism comes into question, and there are personal tensions between the couple.
The crux is that they are also real parents with actual children at ordinary schools. They have private lives and roles at the travel agency to juggle with their undercover activities. As if being working parents wasn't enough of an impingement on family life, there are constant, stressful demands their KGB masters put on them. They suddenly have to leave home, often for days on end; or to disappear down into the basement where they keep their secret code books. They're frequently injured in the field, and have to disguise cuts, bruises and swellings with make-up and lies. While the children - a boy of 9 and a girl of 13 years of age at the start of the series (roughly 1980) – are not exactly neglected, they suffer from lapses of supervision and the odd behaviour caused by their parents' double lives. And then what happens at the beginning is that purely by chance an FBI officer with a family moves in at the house across the street.
There are elements of farce in the bizarre coincidence: a close and genuine friendship develops between the two families. Ironically, they are people doing the same job. Stan Beeman, the FBI agent, has just moved from New Orleans where he has been working undercover, spying on white supremacists. His new job in the capital is in Counter Intelligence. Beeman makes no secret of his profession, while Elizabeth and Philip actively cultivate his and his family's friendship. The men play racquetball, drink beer and gossip; the women cook and gossip, the children do homework and watch TV and play video games together.
Meanwhile, Philip Jennings is developing a romantic relationship with Martha – secretary to Stan Beeman's boss at the FBI - whom he dupes into spying on the Bureau, she believing him to be doing internal surveillance of government security breaches. At the same time, Stan entraps Nina, a junior at the Soviet Rezidans (a bogus cultural office staffed by KGB agents). This also turns romantic, but whereas Philip's marriage goes relatively unaffected by these professional seductions, Stan's – already shaken by the time he has spent undercover – begins to unravel.
I don't need to spoil any of the plot by going much further into each of the threads. As a viewer, you'll either get it or you won't. If you do, the chances of becoming hooked are great. To some extent, we've been here before with The Sopranos, and rooting for villains has been the premise of drama since The Scottish Play. Mafia boss Tony Soprano turning to a psychologist to manage his panic attacks is mirrored here when Philip Jennings accompanies Stan Beeman to EST meetings - forerunner of The Forum and NLP. The idea of Neuro-Linguistic Programming feeding into spying and terrorist activities lost no irony on this old cynic. It's one of the many threads that worked for me, though there were elements I was less taken with.
The use of music is crucial to the soundtrack, with the series following the recent trend of featuring complete numbers as background to certain sequences. In The Americans, nearly all the featured tracks are contemporaneous with the Eighties. You get songs by Phil Collins, David Bowie, The Cure, Bruce Springsteen, New Romantic melding into Disco, Indie into Country and so forth. UK acts seem to get more than their fair share for some reason; and there's no Hip Hop, a genre that should have been worked in somehow. The original music composed and performed by Nathan Barr is broadly electronic, with many actual references to Kraftwerk. The symbolism of the German sound is entirely cogent, the familiarity of the Russian tocsin and balalaika subtly modulated by electronic overtones give them stark totalitarian colours. Barr's theme tune for the series was nominated for a Grammy. Electronic drum and bass beats are employed to pace the operation sequences, which is familiar enough territory in action series, but in The Americans the soundtrack bristles with 80s and other culturally significant leitmotifs. There's a certain amount of occasional music too, with Philip Jennings joining line-dancing sessions, for example, to catchy Country Rock. At one point he buys his daughter Paige the latest album by Yaz (Yazoo in the Yuke).
While I could go on praising the music all night, throwing in odd compliments left and right on the sound effects and even the shock of silence that crops up with unspoiled regularity; I'm afraid it's not so with the reproduction of the dialogue, which too often deteriorates into audio cow pats. For heaven's sake, what is it with the Americans? I mean, those people Over There, collectively (if erroneously) known as the Yanks? Sometimes I get the impression their dialogue tracks are simply slapped on by a deaf horse wielding a palette knife. Talk blips and bulges here, scrapes thin there, and often in-between you get this purple fudge of voice and background noise that is plain annoying. Three or four times I resorted to turning on the bloody subtitles because I just could not catch a single frigging word. One of the drawbacks of the collaborative effort is this: no matter how well an actor says their lines, a conspiracy of sound recordists and editors can render a great performance worthless.
Dialogue doesn't always matter in an action context. I once spent an hour with a student playing and replaying the first five minutes of Die Hard 2 (with Bruce Willis), and trying to write it down. Eighty percent of what was uttered was unintelligible; but it made no real difference, as you could figure out the gist. The palette knife treatment works when the text is only another sound effect. But when two characters are whispering in a bar, and the information exchanged is crucial to your grasp of the scenes that follow, you've got to hear most of those god damn words else you'll feel like Dumbo – all ears and innocence. On the other hand, there's an abundance of well-written dialogue in The Americans, so even if the reproduction often sucks, I have no crib with the writers.
Nostalgia for the Eighties has been around for some time now, and films of the era still get a lot of airplay on broadcast TV. I caught a replay of Ghostbusters II the other month, though Fatal Attraction seems to have lost its mojo. Here in Turkey there's been a long running series called Seksanlar (“The Eighties”) - a soap opera set in the years after the 1980 military coup. However, this is the first political action series I've watched set in the USA during the era, and it makes a real effort to recreate the world just before CCTV, mobile phones and the Internet changed everything forever. On the one hand, there's a liberating aspect to reversing the progress made in the wake of the Cold War. The world of the Eighties appears simpler, the division lines clearer. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were determined to roll back socialism both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, left and right were increasing their stakes in each other's camps. The arms race had created huge industries on either side of the Iron Curtain. Many workers relied on defence jobs, or felt threatened of being sold out to the Warsaw Pact by left wing politicians. As inflation soared, whole sectors of industry were being privatised, and workers rushed to invest their dwindling savings in shares guaranteed to rise. Meanwhile, demographics were shifting power down and outwards. Younger people were taking a more active role in politics, women were asserting their rights, downtrodden races and socially ostracised groups were struggling for justice and power.
The makers of The Americans have taken a few liberties, or employed what was called Artistic Licence. Mostly it's details deliberately glossed over. Pay phones, for instance, too often simply failed to work, but that's never an issue in this version of Eighties Washington. Parking and traffic problems dominated downtown cities, and yet when it's required there's always a convenient space right in front of a building. Failing local government and the ever presence of hard drugs turned many inner city areas into no-go zones. The Americans of DC ride buses and trains outside of commuter hours without trouble. Yuppies and well off youngsters spent freely while many of the masses struggled to make ends meet. The Jennings family, for example, make do without a home help though their house is truly large. I guess the decision not to give them a Filipino or Mexican maid was done to keep the domestic decks as clear as possible. But Elizabeth and Philip rarely do more housework than wash a plate or fold a bit of washing. The one time Paige is seen mopping the floor is an exception that glares. I don't mean to be pernickety, but this version of the Eighties is a little too slick and borders on the “lite”.
Do any imperfections thus far detract from credibility? Crucially, do they bring a Restoration of Disbelief? For me, no. They're not even an issue. The phone dials turned with a finger or pen, the green screen computer monitors, the walkie-talkies as big - and probably as heavy - as clay bricks, the 'hi-tech' electronic devices on handmade PCBs with 'solid state' components and wires all sticking out are authentic enough to garner a knowing smile from the cognoscenti (pre-hipster geek that I am); and if the gadgets get a second glance from anyone under thirty, that's probably all to the good. No matter the payphones always work and the parking is all Kojak-slick. Authenticity has its conventions.
It's curious how the makers don't need CGI for much more than the look of cities back then. Some shots would have needed a bit of digital editing, but mostly the era is recreated through home and office décor, fashion, automobiles and manners. Political correctness is still fairly peripheral. FBI agents and office staff retain a broad shouldered-Fifties look in long coats, sharp skirts and severe haircuts. The Eighties themselves were a mostly forward looking time. Unlike the Seventies, when the clock was constantly being swung back to the Sixties, the Jazz Age, even Victorian times (re Laura Ashley, reproduction Art Nouveau, Art Deco & Pop Art). In the Eighties, most people could hardly wait for the future to arrive. They had to have fuel injection and electric windows, the latest Intel chip, cable TV, to go jogging or play squash after work, and to holiday in far off, exotic locations every year. While Punk and the New Wave had cut many of the frills, the New Romantic Look – at least in the early Eighties – gave people a taste for bolder colours and tighter flowing lines. Socialist or New Realism, a style imported from China and Eastern Europe in the Seventies, still had some traction, especially amongst the left-leaning bourgeoisie. I think it's fair to say the counter-culture Reagan and Thatcher inspired was large and influential enough in reaction to the ruling style, if not the rulers' values.
There was a sense of trying to get ahead which I think The Americans latches onto really well. Capitalism had gone through a kind of blip, and though some backsliders had staggered off, and a new generation of The Poor had risen and quickly been re-disenfranchised, the American Way had somehow prevailed. This was true across much of the world. Despite this, I don't think many people anywhere - even by the mid-Eighties - speculated on the Warsaw Pact actually collapsing at the end of the decade. Even on the Left, there was a positive outlook: people believed technology was bringing the world closer together. America was striding ahead of the pack with its Apple Macintosh/IBM PC, Space Shuttle, media dominance, the global reach of its military and the way it seemed to have the dull, uninspiring Soviets licked in every field. By the end of the decade, how many of us had left our trusty Zenits in the drawer and forked out on a Nikon?
I think it's worth drawing historical parallels. For instance, after the Reformation, when the Catholic church had been decimated, fresh faced Jesuits beheld a population of doubters and non-believers and saw opportunity. But their gains were small in the Old World. Communists in the 1980s thought whole continents were ripe for conversion; and here and there – Nicaragua, for example - they were right. But mostly people looked at the alternatives and there was no contest. Never mind how much they wanted work for all, free health care and education; freedom was represented by automobiles, PCs, fast food and television. The Americans, therefore, and I mean the Illegals - those spies embedded in Washington and other cities across the USA – were only ever fighting a rearguard action. Their struggle was more patriotic than ideological, the best that they could hope for a preservation of the status quo. While life and death struggles took place in a few marginal corners of the world, the main show was the endgame of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan raised the stakes, threatening a Star Wars level of threat against the Soviets. Abandoning the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) in a nuclear war that no one could win, Nato would be capable of an escalation from tactical skirmishing into Strategic warfare that would leave Russia unable to guarantee a catastrophic response.
The Eighties was a period of action for me, when I spent much less time viewing or reading, and far more time doing. But watching The Americans, I often find myself cast back into the Sixties, when I (alongside half the kids in the UK) would regularly hide behind an armchair during the scary bits of Doctor Who. I could barely watch as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings came within a hair's breath of being exposed as spies. Surely - I would ask myself again and again, from Episode One onwards - this is Suspension of Disbelief? Surely, I don't believe these are actual spies? Well, no, they're actors on TV. Alright then, surely I don't believe Elizabeth could hide all her facial bruises and swellings with a few dabs of make-up? Or that Philip could survive so many protracted brawls without ever losing one of his many wigs? Well, of course I don't believe any of that. So, ergo, isn't my disbelief suspended while I'm hardly able to look? Whereas, in fact, I feel compelled to watch.
Some action dramas don't really appeal to me, no matter how good the acting, how well-timed the action, how realistic the sets and the CGI, or how stirring the music, I click off after a few scenes. According to the theory, these would be examples of unsuspended disbelief. Or put the other way, these would be examples of suspended belief. But that's not it either. Of course I don't believe drama is real life. However, I do believe drama can be true... if that's not the same as saying it's realistic; nor the same as naturalistic - the nineteenth century theatrical equivalent of realism. I know an actor is not King Lear or Eliza Doolittle, just as well as I know that those characters are not real people anyway. What a good actor can do is make me believe in their portrayal of the character. A good actor, a good play, a good film, a good novel or short story, a good radio play, a good piece of narrative verse, even a good song, or a symphony like Beethoven's Eroica or Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde can invoke a kind of universal truth. I can marvel at a David Hockney landscape - which on one level looks a bit like a child's daub, and on another a Sunday painter's effort – and see what he's getting at. The work is more than a window looking onto a bit of ground. The painting, just like Derek Jacobi's portrayal of Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1978 somehow gets through to the truth of doomed youth or the beauty of a Yorkshire winter. Therefore, while I can see the cleverness, and to some extent the usefulness of the expression Suspension of Disbelief; for me, good art gives an affirmation of belief. Or as a mathematician might put it, two opposites turn out positive.
Most films and all TV series are made by committees. Yep, there are auteurs out there, people like Orson Welles or Ridley Scott, whose personalities are so overwhelming and whose ideas are forceful enough to push through a project in their own way. However, even the most visionary of director/producers has to employ collaborators and be forced into compromises. Then there are the conventions that allow short cuts to be made; for example, certain tropes – like peanut butter sandwiches – will do to stop a gap or provide continuity. As we watch, we say to ourselves, Here's where the hero discards a jacket, grabs someone's hat and scarf and nonchalantly sidesteps out of a desperate chase scene. Too many of these and we begin to wonder if the budget's been squeezed, a staff writer fired for being too creative, or the producers are having a laugh at our expense. We're apt to give up at this point, unless something else happens that rescues the drama.
Cable/Internet serials have evolved into the modern equivalents of Homer's epics. Via the multi-volume novel – I'm thinking across many genres here, from Compton MacKenzie's Michael Fane series, through The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings quadrilogy, and Stephen King's Dark Tower books to Edna O'Brien's Girl series – it's clear even the solitary author has difficulty keeping control of such extended narratives. In the pilot episode of The Americans, Philip Jennings is a vigilante that beats up a pederast who has made the mistake of hitting on his thirteen year old daughter. This side of him is completely dropped thereafter; and for good reason, as his character is already stacked with enough conflicts. So where does it all lead, when the plot goes a bit wonky circa Series Three? Or when drawn out narratives prove impossible to end, or have to be rounded off more or less implausibly? Often a serial simply comes to a sudden conclusion (Boardwalk Empire) or has its last few episodes rushed (Chance). I'm glad to endorse The Americans (without revealing anything) where after a few wobbly moves the series manages to stay tumescent till its last gasp.
Another concept is that of Unity. In the original Greek drama, the convention was that the action should fit into real time. Of course, the gods of Drama soon asserted themselves over The Clock. Therefore - and this should be true of any work of art – narratives can manipulate time just as fluidly as other source material. The main criteria is that the piece remains true to itself. So this spy serial, set in the Eighties, can flash back to the Fifties and Sixties to explore Philip and Elizabeth's childhood and youth. But it can also step outside of the time frame and examine universal ideas, which it does particularly well in the family lives and friendships the Jenningses have. This is because also in play are the facts of the present day: as we watch, we can't help comparing how for example sexual mores have changed, how the Cold War itself has become a piece of history, or – as I've said above – how quaint and innocent Eighties technology now looks.
The Americans works because it touches nerves, both historical and universal. We know how the Cold War came to an end, and how the dark behemoth of Northern Asia – ie Russia – would stumble in its efforts to keep up with its bright, prodigious rival: naughty American. At the same time, Elizabeth and Philip are parents struggling to bring up children, looking out for each other while harbouring conflicting ideals and loyalties. The situations they have to cope with are often just exaggerated versions of everyday life. We all have up and down relations with neighbours, and we have to keep secrets. We are nosey and protective by turns. We are consciously seduced by pressures to consume, frequently weighing up the moral choices they face. Should we let our children play video games or join groups that have patently different values from our own? Is it right to put work before family, as we so often have to do in the short and medium term? Nowadays isn't the American Dream what most communities follow to a greater or a lesser extent? How fake are we all in our slavish conformities, in the two-faced smiles we're forced to pull, and in the sympathies we all claim to feel?
After the final episode, I watched a couple of YouTube videos of the actors Kerri Russell and Matthew Rhys. They'd played Elizabeth and Philip, become an item, and actually got married soon into Series Two. Did that mean they had sex on set before in real life? And him a Welshman! An Eisteddfod winner! Arglwydd mawr, this stretches belief, not disbelief. Yet there they are, bold as brass, the Hollywood dream couple, doing the chat shows together. Like most actors, they didn't have too much to say for themselves, but one thing struck me. Their series was Barack Obama's favourite viewing while he was in office. They would send him advance copies of episodes. If that doesn't mean The Americans are for real, what in tarnation does?
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