The Americans (season 1)
| The Americans (season 1) | |
|---|---|
DVD cover
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| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of episodes | 13 |
| Release | |
| Original network | FX |
| Original release | January 30 – May 1, 2013 |
| Season chronology | |
The first season of the American television drama series The Americans premiered on January 30, 2013, and concluded on May 1, 2013. It consisted of 13 episodes, each running approximately 45 minutes in length. FX broadcast the first season on Wednesdays at 10:00 pm in the United States. The series is produced by DreamWorks Television. The Americans was created by Joe Weisberg.
Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and their neighbor, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent.
The Americans was created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer. Despite its spy setting, Weisberg set out to tell the story 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.
Working at the CIA, which Weisberg later described as a mistake, has helped him develop several storylines in the series, basing some plot lines on real-life stories, and integrating several things he learned in his training, such as dead drops and communication protocols. Weisberg was fascinated by stories he had heard from agents who served abroad as spies, while raising their families. He was interested in bringing that concept to television, with the idea of a family of spies, rather than just one person. Weisberg also said how the CIA inadvertently gave him the idea for creating a series around spies, explaining, "While I was taking the polygraph exam to get in, they asked the question, 'Are you joining the CIA in order to gain experience about the intelligence community so that you can write about it later -- which had never occurred to me. I was totally joining the CIA because I wanted to be a spy. But the second they asked that question…then I thought, 'Now I'm going to fail the test.'"
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