Fox TV’s The Americans demoralizes and perpetuates old Soviet tricks

By Timothy Fitzpatrick
Sept. 20, 2018 Anno Domini

Sex, violence, and familial dysfunction make up the bulk of Fox television’s drama series The Americans, but Hollywood has given us the added bonus of KGB propaganda.

When your writing sucks and you need to keep the audience hooked before you unleash your indoctrination on them, how do you accomplish this? With sex and violence, of course. This is how Hollywood has done it since the Production Code was abolished.

Thus, Keri Russell, who plays the mother Elizabeth Jennings, and Matthew Rhys, who plays the father Philip Jennings, when they aren’t having sex with each other as crypto-communist all-American parents, are out banging targets on their assassination-and-blackmail list, be they gay, straight, white, or black. They are super KGB agents, after all, and sex and espionage go hand in hand. They even get their teenaged daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), in on the action late in the series. And even though Paige and her mother are petite females, the unrealistic script has them kicking the snot out of any would-be enemies, no matter how big.

Jewish CIA agent-turned TV writer Joseph Weisberg’s insidious TV show is about the lives of KGB assassin parents living in 1980s Washington DC, loosely based on the illegals program of that era. Give Fox FX credit, though. They managed to drag out this tired, poorly written story for six seasons despite extremely low ratings and just about zero audience satisfaction (the bad guys always win). It portrays the villains as ideological heroes—something that is almost never the case with KGB agents (defectors have reported that at least 90 percent of agents are so due to blackmail, not ideology) and the good guys as bumbling fools, like FBI counterintelligence agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), who can’t even discern his across-the-street neighbours, the Jennings, as two of the primary assassins responsible for most of the murder and mayhem going on around him.

The acting is decent, but the speech patterns are atrocious. I guess the directors weren’t sharp enough to realize that East Coasters didn’t uptalk during the 1980s (few people did anywhere in the world). Or perhaps they did know but chose to perpetuate the ongoing degradation of English speech—to which Hollywood has largely contributed.

Now lets get to the point—the culmination of six brutal seasons. The bumbling good guys don’t get to figure out the true identity of the Jennings until the last couple of episodes. But by that time, it’s too late and the villains pretty much escape unharmed—the Jennings parents back to Russia, the kids to elsewhere in the United States.
Beneath all this, the plot is building up the case that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is a reformer who is attempting to democratize Russia (so called Perestroika and Glasnost) and that pretty soon, the Jennings won’t have to go on murdering for the KGB and they can, instead, lead a somewhat normal life. The way the writers transition the Jennings from seemingly enjoying all the killing to then becoming disillusioned is poorly established.
The Perestroika deception is then furthered when the Jennings begin to rebel against their KGB handlers, who they learn are about to stage a coup against Gorbachev (something that the real-life mainstream media portrayed as authentic without a shred of skepticism) in order to keep the Soviet empire intact. The easily-turned Jennings attempt to sabotage events that presumably lead up to the coup, but the show ends before the “August Coup” gets to happen.

Nearly two decades after the real-life staged and fake “August Coup”, communist saboteurs in America, like the writers of The Americans, are still hocking the Perestroika deception. With all that we have learned from countless defectors about how the Soviet leadership remained intact after the so called collapse of communism and the name change, how the country was looted by mainly Jewish-Russian oligarchs, and how the KGB continued to rule and reign through an organized crime-run government, the writers chose to stick with the old lies.

In addition to deceiving the American people about the true fate of the communist world power, The Americans achieves another objective: what KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov called the demoralization phase of a multi-pronged long-term Soviet strategy. The gratuitous sex and violence alone is enough to demoralize the audience. Throw in with that the glorification of Marxist values and the demonization of Western values, and you have completely poisoned the average weak-minded TV watcher. And perhaps the demoralizing nature of the show had a direct effect on the cast themselves, as Keri Russell divorced her real-life husband Shane Deary as she allegedly pursued one with her on-screen husband Matthew Rhys. This shows us that even the propagandists themselves cannot escape the consequences of their own crafting.

Ultimately, this show requires a huge investment of time with pretty much zero cathartic value and mediocre entertainment at best—Soviet propaganda aside.