The first episode of The Americans is one of the most perfect episodes of TV I've ever watched from a my-kinks perspective. CW: rape, and brief sexual harassment of a minor.
Non spoilery burbling followed by spoilery burbling (again, just for the first episode, which is 40m long)
NON SPOILERY
The main characters are a married couple of KGB spies who have been in deep cover as normal Americans for almost two decades. They have two preteen kids who have no idea.
They are both phenomenally competent – a lot of my pleasure lies in just watching them work.
He's acclimated to his life and feels the pull of the life he's playacting – he's a goofball dad, more naturally affectionate with his kids, more drawn to American prosperity. A new mall opens up and he mentions to his wife, on the way there with his kids, that it has "fountains and skylights". I love that line – so unimportant, but she'd never say it.
She's the fanatic. She idealizes the Soviet way and despises Americans for their weakness in comparison, but it's also been decades since she was in the country. It seems that, even before she left, she was so immersed in her harsh training program during her formative years that she lost touch with what normal Soviets were like.
He's in love with her but not so much the other way around, and watching him try to love her is like watching someone trying to grab a knife by the sharp end.
They can only be mostly open with each other. A cult of two. And even then – because they were told not to share their pre-spy lives with each other, to make it easier to keep their cover stories straight – they don't even know each other's birth names until the end of episode 1.
SPOILERY
Oh my gosh. So. I'm really into how he's in love with her and how emotionally unsafe she is to love because of who she is.
He listens to a tape of her seducing a CIA guy and the unhappy microexpressions rippling on his face as he listens to it – amazing! You just know she's never been expressive with him during sex, because it wasn't necessary for the job.
At another point he comes home and starts kissing the back of her neck in the kitchen, and her expression tightens as he ignores her stop words, and she whirls on him with a knife. He says, "You're my wife." She replies, "Is that right," and her eyes say: that means nothing to me.
And of course –
The guy they're keeping in their trunk, a Soviet defector they kidnapped, is a colonel who raped her in her cadet days. She's cracking under her desire for revenge, arguing for killing him immediately (rather than waiting out the American scrutiny on every train station / port, and shipping him back to the motherland), and not saying a word about her personal reasons. When it comes out – because the colonel, tired and expressionless, apologizes after she beats the shit out of him – her husband veers on a dime from planning to return the colonel to American hands and defecting himself, to choking the colonel to death in the garage.
They dispose of the corpse together and fuck in the car. I find this unbearably romantic. Especially because... (1) the intimacy is genuine, her loyalties really do shift closer to him (she lies to her superior about his loyalty for the first time), but (2) sleeping with him at this junction is also the strategically optimal for her to be doing to manage him. She cares about him, unlike the other men she manages with sex, but he is in fact in that category for her.
There's no way he doesn't know that, but he loves her anyway, and maybe even admires her for it. He's so fucked.
Mutuals who I have hardly spoken with but we instead communicate through silently liking and reblogging each other's posts... I hope you're all having a lovely day ✨
Interviewer: By the way, when talking to [Keri Russell], she never once referred to you by your first name. What do you think she called you throughout the interview?
Matthew Rhys: Probably “the Welshman.”
Interviewer: She did. Is that how she refers to you all day long?
Matthew Rhys: It is. I’m surprised if she actually does know my first name. I should start calling her “the American.”
Matthew Rhys & Keri Russell for Variety Emmy Portrait Studio: Drama Contenders
Photographed by Peter Yang/Variety
Matthew Rhys ‘The Americans’
“There’s always a lot between Philip and Elizabeth that is unsaid — it screams in the room. I think a lot of people relate to that. All those jealousies, envies and insecurities that you have but don’t necessarily voice.”
Keri Russell ‘The Americans’
“It’s been a really good six years for many reasons. It’s hard to look at scripts right now. I could read the best thing ever, and I wouldn’t even know it.”
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