TV Takes Up Soviet Sleeper Cells in the United States: FX’s New Series The Americans
It is the particular premise of the new FX cable TV series The Americans that the Soviets had ready to go when called lots of sleeper cells of KGB agents living in the United States. Taking place in the years of the Reagan administration, the show depicts the exploits of a husband and wife who seem, at first introduction, a typical young, middle-class suburban couple living in the Washington, D.C., area, with a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son, to whom they are loving parents.
The couple, Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, are played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys. Viewers quickly learn that their coupling was a KGB-arranged marriage. Brought together in the Soviet Union by KGB bosses, they are trained in the ways of America, taught perfect English, and then smuggled into the U.S., where the KGB buys them a nice home and establishes a travel agency for them to run as a perfect front. As part of the deal, they are expected, as most Americans are, to have children and raise a family.
Their days are spent running their business and taking their kids to school, while their evenings (and sometimes their days) are spent in such endeavors as kidnapping a KGB defector who has become too prominent on the lecture circuit, and preparing upon orders to spy upon the home of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, where a top level meeting is to take place at which they hope major American secrets will be revealed. To do this job, the couple has to force Weinberger’s African-American maid to place a bug on a clock in Weinberger’s study, which they accomplish by poisoning her son with a toxic agent for which only they have an antidote.
Ironically, viewers learn that their next-door neighbor is an FBI agent named Stan, played by Noah Emmerich, who is suspicious of everyone, and naturally wonders whether everything is as it seems with his neighborly friends. The Jennings do not know whether he moved there because the Bureau suspects them. To boot, Stan’s area is counter-intelligence and searching for secret Soviet agents operating in the United States.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, along you come to point out a new outrage. It’s your calling, and we’re grateful for it. Joe Weisberg’s comments about The Americans series tell one a lot about the zeitgeist. Who’s afraid of socialism? Neither Hollywood or the Progressives, of course: they hunger for it. The rest of us poor schlubs don’t seen to know enough about it to find out. Compared to reality as the Obama administration describes it to us, the Cold War was silly, WWII a folly committed by beings not-so-perfect as we are. If you recommend The Americans series, allow me to recommend Portlandia (IFC, whatever cable network that is), which parodies those places in the U.S. where nothing after 1975 really happened. Very entertaining, and you know its heart in close to some right place by the fact that Roseanne Barr becomes temporary mayor and is run out for suggesting that these Oregonians be normal urbanites. Another recommendation: “How to Be Danish” by Brit Patrick Kingsley, wherein the Danes (although for different reasons) are portrayed as crazy as the Portlanders. Reading it, I couldn’t help wishing that the Danes had had to suffer through Soviet occupation. The Balts, who did, have a much firmer grasp on history and reality than those purportedly happiest people in the world, the Danes. Ron, keep you eye out for the next step in television outrageousness: The Americans with the “c” a star and crescent.
I have only seen the trailers. will not watch show.
Question…who are the sponsors? I will not buy their products.
ta
So it looks as if the Soviets won the hearts and minds of many New Leftists. In the same way, the recent movie LINCOLN may win hearts and minds for a peaceful resolution of all our irreconcilable conflicts. I suggested here that the South and/or the conciliationists of the North triumphed in historical memory of the American Civil War. See http://clarespark.com/2013/02/09/lincoln-the-movie-as-propaganda/.
“Thank God it’s only television we’re talking about”
Yeah meanwhile your fellow wingers are signing petitions to secede. Talk about traitors!
It’s not that we were two competing systems. It’s that we still are.
Except this time it’s not in your face with subs and nuclear weapons. It’s stealthy and using the institutions in the West where the government essentially controls all the variables. And everyone must show up for an extended period of the most malleable time of their life.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/ is what is coming at us K-12 and higher ed. Preschool is next using the Reggio Emilia template. I actually do know what so many of the educators apparently had been told from the mid-80s on on how to use a different front to fight over gaining the desired control over consciousness. I had to read it from multiple angles in many places while saying “Really?” to accept it was not quite as over as we were led to believe.
And now Ron writes that a TV series wants to help explore the competing systems.
Filtering mindsets. The perception of the day to day. Precisely what is being targeted. Not just Oliver Stone, now it is a TV series with likeable characters.
A comment fully worthy of RR’s post.
SHOULD READ
“the Soviets had lots of sleeper cells of KGB agents living in the United States ready to go when called.”