When it comes to “The Americans,” FX’s eighties spy drama, you gotta start with the wigs. There’s the Vamp. The feathered Farrah. The Clark, a nerdy number that resembles a flattened cairn terrier. There’s the Handyman’s Ponytail, the Blond Meringue, and the Klute—all stored, presumably, in some magnificent wig safe in a house outside Washington, D.C., where Philip and Elizabeth Jennings have lived for nearly twenty years, in a marriage that was brokered by the K.G.B.
The wigs are splashy fun—at times, they’re as over the top as anything in “American Hustle”—but they’re not a superficial element of the series. “The Americans,” now in its second season, is a show about human personality as a cruel performance, even (and sometimes especially) with the people we claim to love. It’s about marriage as much as it is about politics. And its unpretentious visuals—from those goofy bangs to the no-frills, low-budget camerawork—are a gift to the viewer. Without this hint of aesthetic distance, the story might be too sad to watch.
Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell play the Jenningses, who grew up in the Soviet Union before being paired, in their early twenties, and sent to the United States. They’ve built a Potemkin marriage, bringing up two American children and pretending to work as travel agents. In reality, they are spies (they seem to have exceptionally flexible babysitters): they seduce “assets,” listen in for radio codes, and threaten vulnerable targets. For years, the couple got on well enough, repressing layers of resentment and secrets—among them, the fact that Elizabeth was raped when she was twenty by her K.G.B. trainer. In the pilot, Philip learns about this traumatic history and kills the man who, decades earlier, raped his wife; his act at once bonds the pair and nearly wrecks them. They look at each other and feel a jolt: after all these years, are they strangers?
Of course, this sort of crisis in a decades-long marriage is hardly reserved for the K.G.B. Just across the street, the F.B.I. agent Stan Beeman (the wonderful Noah Emmerich) is dealing with his own, perhaps more intractable marital issues, having recently emerged from years undercover. He can barely talk with his wife and son, and he’s fallen into a passionate affair with his asset Nina, who works at the Soviet Embassy. As the show progresses, we weave back and forth between opposing ideologies and varied couples, with the Russians scheming inside the plush rezidentura and the Americans fighting back from the spare F.B.I. headquarters; our sympathies can’t settle on anyone. Philip and Elizabeth are murderers who are trying to destroy America. Stan and Nina are somehow lovers, victims, and perpetrators all at once: last season, he blackmailed her into being a double agent, but now she’s begun informing on him to her Russian bosses. Inside the rezidentura, she types up their sex life in official reports, like some pornographic Scheherazade, spinning tales to save her own head.
Perhaps the strangest marriage in the show is the one that should be the biggest sham—that of Philip Jennings and Martha (Alison Wright), an F.B.I. secretary whom he spent last season seducing, quite tenderly, so that she would bug her boss’s office. At the end of the first season, he “married” her, wearing his Clark wig, as she stood beaming, carrying a small bouquet. By their side was Elizabeth, in a bouffant hair style and glasses, playing the role of her husband’s sister. Like so much of “The Americans,” that moment should have felt absurd, but it was heartbreaking. Although Martha is a dupe, she’s also the one honest person in the ensemble, and her imaginary marriage has evolved into a funny, disturbing facsimile of a genuine one, in which everything Philip says seethes with anxious, angry half-truths. “This isn’t my home,” he argues, trying to leave for another mission, as she begs him for a long-promised lazy morning in bed. “I’m like an intruder,” he says.
Season 1 was very good, but a few plots curdled, and it had some weak performances. This season is an exciting step up: the plots have a stark poetic symmetry, echoing themes without overexplaining them. When another spy couple and their daughter are murdered, and their corpses are found by their son, the Jenningses are forced to confront their own family’s vulnerability. Yet, episodes later, Elizabeth is threatening a father by pronouncing the name of his child, while Philip kidnaps a Russian-Jewish expatriate with a young son. As spies, they are deadly compartmentalizers, yet as parents they are disoriented and outmatched. When their daughter, Paige, begins to keep her own secrets, Philip and Elizabeth are too upset to face their hypocrisy: they’ve raised their kids to be their cover story.
The show’s trickery has an added layer: we’re watching actors give brilliant performances as actors who give brilliant performances. In one of this season’s most fascinating sequences, Elizabeth manipulates a virginal naval cadet to get classified information. At first, it seems to us, her other audience, that she’s unable to pull off the seduction of someone so vulnerable. “I’m really blowing this,” she whispers, tearful, as they embrace—and then she rushes away, trailing excuses. At home, when Philip asks about the case, she says, “Piece of cake.” It turns out that she’s setting a trap for the soldier. She’s playing a woman who was raped, to make her target feel protective, so he’ll steal classified files. There’s a palpable complexity to this, because she’s duped us, too. As the viewer knows, Elizabeth’s rape didn’t make her skittish: if anything, it steeled her as a true believer (having sacrificed so much, she has to believe it’s worth it, unlike Philip, who has considered defecting). And yet, as much as Elizabeth is playing a role—a shy classical-music fan in a pale-pink sweater—she’s also describing her real-life assault, and then playacting a new outcome, in which she is open and fragile, and a man comes to her rescue and comforts her.
This focus on performance makes the show a highly satisfying showcase for its actors, particularly the Welsh actor Rhys, a shape-shifter who snaps with unsettling ease from sad-eyed puppy to sneering enforcer, and the show’s hidden gem, the hypnotically beautiful Annet Mahendru, as Nina. Because the show is on FX, there’s little nudity, but it’s sexier than many pay-cable series, in part because it’s about life as kinky role-play, in part because it suggests such unnerving questions about human intimacy. Even for skillful seducers, there’s a level at which doing is the same as being. To be a great actor, “you’ve got to be honest,” as George Burns once put it. “And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Several strong new comedies are on air this spring. There’s the raunchy “Inside Amy Schumer,” entering its second season on Comedy Central, a sketch show that is a perfect showcase for Schumer, whose persona is basically Miss Piggy on Tinder: she does skits about herpes and military rape, and man-on-the-street interviews about sexting, all of which work way better than this summary makes them sound. There’s IFC’s fourth season of “Portlandia,” which cluster-bombs its tiny targets. And there’s HBO’s “Doll & Em,” a sour, “Extras”-like satire of Hollywood narcissism, starring Emily Mortimer and her real-life friend Dolly Wells.
But if you’re looking for pure laughs, and a fresh subject for television, the best option may be HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” directed by Mike Judge. For anyone with even passing experience of the tech industry, this show is a high-grade Proustian pot brownie. Thomas Middleditch plays Richard, a meek corporate coder who works at Hooli, a Google-like company; in his off-hours, he develops programs in an entrepreneurial “incubator.” When he hits on a data compressor whose potential he barely recognizes, he finds himself a pawn in the battle between a Peter Thiel-esque V.C. (Christopher Evan Welch) and a sinister Steve Jobs-like C.E.O. (Matt Ross). Suddenly, his roommates are vying for points, and his obnoxious marketer landlord is mentoring him on how to be a boss: “You’re being a complete tool right now. I need you to be a complete asshole—do you understand the difference? If you’re not an asshole, this company dies.”
The show is well structured, with blunt but effective sitcom beats, and, refreshingly, it isn’t an “Entourage”-tinted fantasy. Although the names of all the greats (Brin! Musk! Zuckerberg!) are on everyone’s lips, the characters know how those stories end—with a jackpot and a sheaf of bitter lawsuits. The pilot nails both the Darwinian grimness of Silicon Valley—where even a liquor-store clerk complains that his app hasn’t been funded—and the way it gets packaged in phony do-gooder-ism. At Hooli, the walls feature slogans like “It takes change to make change.” When a marketer trips on mushrooms, he finds himself muttering, in a panic, “Making the world a better place. Making the world a better place.” The physical details are just right: the billionaire in toe-separating sneakers; the Perplexus-brand globe that a programmer picks up and begins rattling as he talks; the control-freak hippie who stands in a filthy kitchen screaming, “Who ate my fucking quinoa?”
Middleditch is perfectly cast as Richard, whose diffidence hides a prickly intelligence, and Welch is excellent as the quavery, goony-eyed Peter Gregory, who, like the real Peter Thiel, creates a fund for young people who agree to skip college. (“Maybe I should reënroll and drop out again, try and get the money,” Richard theorizes.) At its best, the show echoes not only Judge’s cult film “Office Space” but the late, great Starz sitcom about Los Angeles, “Party Down,” another portrait of a one-industry town spiked with self-hate. A coder suddenly realizes, about the app he’s worked on for months, “I made a perverted, sexist, useless thing.” Even rich people can’t get their beautiful creations to work right. In a moment of excitement, a billionaire calls out to his voice-recognition software, “Play John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’!” “Cuing John Wayne in a mansion,” the voice responds. “Not found.” ♦
