“I was trained to defend myself.”
Created by: Joe Weisberg
Run time: 39–54 minutes – 70 minutes (pilot)
The Americans is an American television period drama series created and produced by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg. The series premiered in the United States on January 30, 2013 on the cable network FX.
Set in the early 1980s during the Cold War, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple living in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., with their children (Holly Taylor and Keidrich Sellati) and their neighbor, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent working in counterintelligence.
The fourth season premiered on March 16, 2016. On May 25, 2016, FX set an end-date for the series by renewing it for a fifth and sixth season. The 13-episode fifth season will air in 2017, followed by a 10-episode sixth and final season in 2018.
The Americans was created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer. Despite its spy setting, Weisberg aimed to tell the story of a marriage. The series focuses on the personal and professional lives of the Jennings’, sometimes incorporating real-life events into the narrative. The show’s creator has described the series as being ultimately about a marriage: “The Americans is at its core a marriage story. 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.”Executive producer Joel Fields 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.
Watch Seasons 1-3 on Amazon Prime. Use your login credentials to watch Season 4 on FXNOW. Purchase episodes or a season pass on VUDU, iTunes, YouTube or GooglePlay.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
