In the suburbs of Washington DC during the early 1980s, a familyrun travel agency provides cover for a married couple who are, in fact, KGB ‘Illegals’, Soviet agents fighting deep behind Cold War enemy lines. This is the premise of The Americans(2013–), one of the most unlikely hit television dramas of recent years. Framed by the everyday concerns of an ordinary American family, the show is at once ludicrous – the agents’ next-door neighbour is an FBI officer – and nostalgic, not just for the paraphernalia of the 1980s but for an era when commitment might mean something beyond self-interest. While initially the narrative appears to be taking shape as a drama of defection – the male agent's concern for the couple's two children leads him to wonder whether they ought to turn themselves in – the show swerves away from what might have become a conventional story of redemption through renunciation. Instead, the couple's resolve hardens and the audience is invited to root for a pair of assassins contemptuous of American freedoms (the mother despairs because her teenage daughter wants to go to church; in diners, they are appalled by the length of the menu). The United States intelligence community is hardly portrayed in a favourable light: the FBI man next door destroys his marriage by having an affair with an attractive Soviet spy, whose punishment is imprisonment in the Gulag. The senior Bureau officer is played by Richard Thomas, an actor best known as John-Boy in The Waltons, the sentimental Depression-set soap from the 1970s. The Soviets are far cooler: hardbodied, ruthless and much more effective, they are able to drop the kids off at school before disposing of a body by snapping the bones and folding it into a suitcase.

The Americansmanages to deliver a perspective on the US that would have been inconceivable only a few years ago: an unstable, inconsistent, yet occasionally direct anti-Americanism. Historical distance, of course, provides the necessary safety valve; everybody knows the Soviet Union will soon crumble.