Joe Weisberg
The Americans

THE REVIEW

The identity of a person is a heterogeneous set of elements, culture, facts, experiences cultivated, assimilated, and chosen on a background not initially chosen. How fixed and immutable our identity is, certainly formed, depends on each individual's willingness to continue affirming it even when the backdrop of their life tests its very essence.

"The Americans" is the series about identity, about being individuals in a reality that tends to homogenize us, redefining us all as identical in our illusion that being against a system is an assertion of our "self" against those who are accomplices or slaves of that system. Because in the events of a seemingly ordinary couple of middle-class American citizens in the Reagan-era USA of the early '80s, the great conflict over their concealed and hidden Soviet identity reigns, serving their country to the last in the ranks of the KGB. An identity that will be severely tested and continuously questioned in an American system that appears disgusting to their eyes, even if life seems much easier compared to that lived in Mother Russia. "The Americans" is not a simple "spy" series; it's more of a profound psychological investigation into all the protagonists and their continuous struggle to remain steadfast as events unfold; the espionage events appear as a normal routine in the lives of Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), authentic "death machines" at the service of an increasingly distant and fractured USSR. There is no good and evil, no oppositions between the FBI (the tormented and excellent Noah Emmerich) and the KGB, everyone lives in an immense gray area whose margins constantly expand, making it difficult to hold onto the certainty that something definitively certain and immutable exists.

Four masterpiece seasons have made "The Americans" the cult series par excellence of this new decade; the quality of the historical reconstruction and the acting, the more genuine cinematic style of a clear '70s imprint worthy of the best of Pollack enrich and elevate it, setting it a cut above other more talked-about contemporary series.