“Loving The Americans!” Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted on February 19th—to which one can only say “Whoa,” or possibly “Yowza.” One user—presumably not a fan of the beloved FX drama, in which Russian spies pose as ordinary Americans—assumed that Haley was referring to the American people (“We love you back!”); everyone else marvelled at the difference a year can make. Last June, when its fourth season concluded, “The Americans” was a series about the pastness of the past. We observed the willingness of Mischa and Nadezhda, a.k.a. Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), to sacrifice themselves for an idea, Soviet Communism, that had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Nine months and one election later, however, the show has become a yardstick for our warped, present moment. What’s more unbelievable: “The Americans,” or the front page of the Times?
No one can say how much the new season, which premières tonight, will rhyme with ongoing discoveries about Russian hacking and Team Trump. (That depends not on the writers but on the outcome of numerous ongoing investigations.) For now it’s enough to cackle, gloomily, about how much that unreliable “intelligence dossier” on our President seems to echo plot points from the show, and to meditate upon the blurry boundary between art and life. Watching the fifth season, one’s first thought is that it all seems newly plausible—but that, of course, suggests the degree to which our ideas about spycraft come from movies and television shows. Perhaps the sources interviewed by Christopher Steele, the former M.I.6 agent who compiled the dossier, were “Loving The Americans,” too.
In any case, the new season tells us more about ourselves than it does about Russia or Trump. As the first episode opens, we discover that Philip and Elizabeth are working with a new agent—a young Vietnamese man named Tuan (Ivan Mok). They’re posing as Tuan’s parents while he, in turn, pretends to be a high-school student; his goal is to befriend the son of a Russian dissident whose family has just arrived in America. At home, of course, Philip and Elizabeth’s real daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), is struggling with the realization that her parents are secretive and violent Soviet spies; she’s also falling in love with Matthew, the son of the F.B.I. agent across the street. She wants to be a regular American teen-ager. With Tuan, there are no such complications. He’s from North Vietnam, hates America, and suggests that Philip and Elizabeth shoot the dissident in the head. “He’s a real piece of shit,” Tuan says. “He hates his homeland.”
Later, Tuan offers a withering critique of American kids—they’re obsessed with clothes, stuff their faces, and have no idea what real struggle is. Do Philip and Elizabeth agree with him? It’s hard to say, but when they come home to their own kids, they’re sweet. You can date any boy you want, Elizabeth tells Paige—“just not Matthew.” In its own way, in other words, this season is shaping up to be about the drama of immigration and assimilation. Can Philip and Elizabeth, as parents, reconcile themselves to the Americanized choices of their children?
The new season activates another sleeper theme: tribalism. When Philip, Elizabeth, and Tuan have dinner with the dissident family, the father, who’s just arrived from the Soviet Union, tells appalling stories about Russian corruption and food shortages. He knows more about Soviet life than Philip and Elizabeth do—they haven’t been home in years—but his information washes over them; they don’t want to hear it. On one level, their silence is an act; on another, it reflects a real indifference to the facts. They simply can’t allow themselves to know the truth about what the dissident calls a “broken system.”
Among other things, “The Americans” is about being trapped in a bubble. Today, we live in Facebook “filter bubbles”; the Jenningses are trapped in more fundamental, sinister ways. Still, we both want the same things. Will Philip and Elizabeth ever see America directly? Or will they always look at the country through an ideological lens? By their past actions—and through the arbitrary fact of having been born in one place rather than another—they have become committed to a view of the world which they are unwilling to revise. Maybe, by accident, “The Americans” is offering us a lurid reflection of the Trump-and-Russia imbroglio. By design, however, it reflects our own inability to change our minds.