Real Russian Spies Don’t Live Up to ‘The Americans’
The implausible genius of the agents in the Emmy-winning TV drama misleads actual Americans about the nature of the Kremlin threat.
Scary.
Photographer: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images“The Americans,” the TV show about Russian agents embedded in the U.S. in the 1980s, has gone out with a bang, winning two Emmy Awards for its final season. It’s getting no prizes from me, though, for its portrayal of Russian spies so implausibly effective and resourceful that I suspect it made it easier for actual Americans to leap to premature conclusions about Trump-Russia collusion.
“The Americans” was, indeed, unusual for a U.S.-made spy drama about Russians. It’s literally the only one I’ve seen — and, like many Russians, I take a perverse pleasure in watching this sort of thing, so I’ve seen a lot of them — in which Russian-language dialogue is not cringe-worthy. The last three seasons of the series owe a lot to Masha Gessen, the Russian-born author and journalist hired to translate the dialogue.