1x01 Pilot

[8.4/10] The Americans is a prestige drama, and it wants you to know that. It’s not just that the first episode opens with a spate of sex and violence, dimly lit and full of people making profound declarations about this or that. It’s the way that this pilot mixes and matches elements from the rest of prestige T.V.

If you like The Sopranos you have a story about “the bad guys” who want to keep their kids away from the dark parts of their lives, while the feds are circling up and trying to catch them. If you like Mad Men, then you have the slick protagonists in a particular point of American history doing their dirty business and then, shock of shocks, coming home to a seemingly normal suburban family where deeper troubles simmer beneath the surface. If you like Breaking Bad, you have the protagonists debating what to do with the baddie locked away in the house, while dad bides his time and beats up the jerk at the department store who dares disrespect his child.

(And if you like The Wire, well, you’re pretty much out of luck beyond the cat and mouse game between the cops and criminals, but three out of four ain't bad.)

That’s not a knock, necessarily. There’s tropes of that era of prestige drama that have become nigh omnipresent: the villainous (or at least morally complicated) protagonist, the double life, the struggle to balance one’s immoral business responsibilities with one’s more moral domestic ones. But they’re tropes for a reason, because these are the kinds of approaches that have allowed tons of shows and showrunners to craft meaningful characters and conflicts and stories with nuance and layers of complexity.

The Americans feels very familiar, very of a piece with those other shows, in its opening hour, but it also holds its own. There’s worse company to keep.

“Pilot”, true to its name, does the things a T.V. pilot’s supposed to do while functioning as a complete vignette of this particular inflection point in the Jennings’ life. It introduces the main characters and establishes their basic traits and wants and personalities. It sets up the premise of the show -- with a pair of Russian spies gone deep undercover in the United States, hiding behind the mask of the nice, normal family to conduct their deadly and dangerous espionage without suspicion. It adds the wrinkle of an FBI agent who lives across the street to keep the intrigue and danger up even when things seem calm.

And it has plenty of portentous statements about how Things Are About To Go Down and This Is A Very Important And Precarious Time and you should definitely keep watching because people are almost straight up telling you that scary and exciting things are about to go down, each and every week.

But the best thing that The Americans does in its opening hour is give you a short but revealing look at who Philip and Elizabeth are, what the conflict between them is, and how each of them changes, or at least moves closer to the other, in the course of that hour.
Elizabeth is a fiercely devoted, to her country and to her mission, and willing to sacrifice pretty much anything in service of them. The quiet, suburban wife routine is entirely an act, one that she grits and bears for the sake of serving the motherland, but not one that she’s ever adopted or wants to. She plays the part, but keeps it at arms’ length, and can barely restrain her disgust at her children being raised in a culture she views as a capitalist hellscape. She’s willing to let her comrades die in the name of completing their objectives, and she’s ready to kill when the situation calls for it. She is all-in on this mission, the perfect soldier and the perfect spy, but anything else is a costume she puts on.

Philip is a talented spook in his own right, one good enough in combat to scrap with whomever he’s up against, and sharp enough at his job to have cultivated an unwitting informant on the inside of the FBI. He’s willing to risk mission failure to save the life of a compatriot. He too has been trained since he was a young man twenty years ago to inhabit this life in a way that no one could detect.

The difference, though, is that he’s okay with that mask. He’s okay with America, with the idea that little things like cold air and the whole place being brighter are something he could get use to for the rest of his life. He could defect, for the right place, and for the chance to make this pretend family a real one. He loves his kids and wants this life with them to be real and permanent.

And he loves Elizabeth. That may be the biggest wedge between the Jennings. “Pilot” gives the sense that in the twenty years they’ve been together, this marriage has become more than an obligatory partnership for Phillip; it’s become something he genuinely feels, to where he wants to play “ice cream olympics” with his bride and recoils at her recorded conversations with top federal agents in the midst of sexual encounters. Elizabeth doesn't seem to feel the same way, retreating from Philip’s touch and balking at the idea of them running away from their Russian lives in order to cement their American ones.

That question is further complicated by the presence of their new neighbor, Stan, who just so happens to be an FBI agent, leading the Jennings to wonder whether the feds are onto them, or if it’s just a coincidence that nevertheless makes their lives more difficult. In truth, that narrative choice seems like something out of a cheesy sitcom -- the foreign spy with a counterintelligence agent right next door, exchanging brownies and asking to borrow spark plugs.

But The Americans goes deeper than that. For one thing, it makes Stan a distorted, mirror image of Philip and Elizabeth, as someone who himself went deep undercover in a white supremacist group. He is uniquely positioned to understand them, to relate to them, but also to catch them. And yet he has his own complication of needing to detox from that life, of questioning his own judgment of his presumably nice, normal neighbors and turn off his paranoid instincts when he’s in an environment where, at least as far as he knows, she no longer needs them.

The episode constructs and deploys a nice little puzzle box and set of moral dilemma to tease all of this out. Elizabeth’s human intelligence-gathering leads them to the whereabouts of a prominent Russian defector. The Jennings and an ally abduct the guy and intend to hand him off to their Soviet confederates, but as always happens on T.V. shows, something goes wrong.

So until they can make contact with their handlers, Philip and Elizabeth debate what to do with the turncoat Ruskie captain tied up in the trunk of their car, while Philip plies his contact at the FBI for info on their investigation, and Stan sniffs around his new neighbors’ house, sensing that something’s up.

It’s a nice framework for the episode, that provides a nice excuse for the Jennings to engage in some spycraft, to force the two of them to have to thread the needle between being Soviet spies and an American family, and for the show to demonstrate how it can deliver the pulse-pounding intrigue of spooks in action and the nuanced character work of the main figures of the show figuring out their place within it.

And it also provides an excuse for each to inch a little closer to the other, to use what they believe to break a bit of their rules and move nearer to common ground. Elizabeth’s frustration with Philip is that he is not all-in, and not willing to embrace the dirty (read: bloody) work that their job requires in service of the mission. He wants to let the tied-up defector live until they can hand him off, while she’s desperate to kill the guy.

That is, until Philip finds out that the defector raped Elizabeth when she was a cadet, and suddenly the reluctant spook is ready, willing, and able to take him out. He may not be anxious to kill for his country, but he is, as his interlude with the creep who hits on his daughter at the mall indicates, ready to use the violence he was taught to protect the family that he loves.

And Philip’s great frustration with Elizabeth is that he wants them to be a real couple, not just dutifully putting on the mask of the suburban family, but truly being man and wife. I’ll admit, there’s something a little uncomfortable about not only the fact that Elizabeth is quickly introduced as a rape victim in episode one, but also that it’s Philip killing her rapist that leads to the physical intimacy with her that he’d been denied multiple times earlier in the episode, coded as a level beyond duty that Elizabeth isn’t interested in.

But more compelling is Elizabeth’s act of purer intimacy with Philip -- that she tells him about her old life, her pre-American life -- something forbidden and until now unshared between the two. And when she has the chance to turn Philip in to their superiors for his own attempted defection, she defends him, keeps him in her life a little longer.

That’s the thing that immediately separates The Americans from its prestige television forebears. Emerging from an era of T.V.’s difficult men, this is Elizabeth’s show as much as it is Philip’s in the early going. Here are a pair of individuals, with complimentary but opposite inclinations in that double life, conflicting pulls and impulses between their dirty jobs and their cleaner families, and plenty of messy, thorny ground to cover between them, enough to sustain the series as long as it needs to go.

The Americans is prestige T.V. to the core, with all the sturm und drang and literally dark doings that come with that, but for once, it’s also a double act.