Study the history of civilizations, open your fridge, look in the mirror: everywhere you will see the unmistakable signs of decay. Entropy is as inescapable in the realm of culture as in nature, which is why so much of what we see on screen seems so familiar—or so I believed until I began watching The Americans, FX’s series about two Soviet spies pretending to be a normal suburban couple. The show has improved with each season and its fourth, coming out next month, is poised to be its best.
In its early seasons, The Americans turned on the familiar Hitchcockian contrast of outward suburban normalcy and underlying malignance. That nice couple over there? They’re not travel agents; they’re Soviet spies ready to kiss, kill, or marry whomever they have to in order to advance the cause.
It is never possible in this kind of drama to doubt the existence of evil. Whether or not one can believe in a positive good—and what good one should believe in—is a much more difficult theme, and it is the one to which The Americans has now turned.
The wife, Elizabeth Jennings (played by Keri Russell) is the true believer. The husband Phillip (played by Matthew Rhys) doubts. He buys a sports car because he enjoys American consumption. He even proposes defecting. She’ll have none of it. What about the global revolution? They have to stay true to the cause, and Phillip does, however reluctantly.
But conflict erupts again when the KGB tells the Jennings that they want to recruit the couple’s daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) as an agent. Paige knows nothing about what her parents do and Phillip doesn’t want to see her pulled into the world of sex, violence, and lies that he and his wife inhabit. Elizabeth, like Abraham, is ready to sacrifice her own for the cause. Once again, the doubter is in the right, the true believer in the wrong. So far, so conventional.
But there is the matter of Paige’s faith. She’s joined a youth group at a local church that is at once committedly evangelical and strongly progressive (they sing praise and worship songs and protest nuclear weapons). Elizabeth is especially worried. How could her daughter get hooked on the opiate of the masses? But she has hope. Armed with the certainty that religion is just a delusion, she believes that her daughter’s socially progressive beliefs can be developed into full-on communist commitment. Ethical beliefs treasured by Paige—honesty, non-violence—will be swamped by the exigencies of the revolutionary cause. All she’ll need is a bit of encouragement in order to discard Christ and accept Stalin as her political lord and savior.
And this is where the last season ends. Elizabeth is betting on a personal version of the secularization thesis and Marxist messianism—religion will fade, Communism triumph. History has not been kind to this secularization thesis. Will The Americans? If Paige holds on to her faith, the series will be suggesting that religion can’t be reduced to political terms or psychological categories. This is an obvious point in the real world, perhaps, but one not often enough seen on TV. Who would have thought it would end up being explored by a show about Cold War Communist spies?
