The Americans

It's been years since Keri Russell had had her own TV show, but now the actress is a back in a series that puts her in situations Felicity Porter would never have dreamed of. In The Americans, Russell plays a Russian agent devoted to the motherland during the Cold War-era 1980s, along with her onscreen husband Matthew Rhys. I've checked out the FX show's pilot, so I have some insight into whether The Americans might be the next TV series you can't miss.

• What it's about: Phillip (Rhys) and Elizabeth (Russell) are the average American couple living in the suburbs in the 1980s, with the perfect nuclear family (one son and one daughter) — only they're actually not American at all. In fact, Phillip and Elizabeth are Russian agents just posing as citizens and doing work as KGB agents.
• Where it works: Russell and Rhys have fantastic chemistry, which serves their interesting relationship; though they've been "together" for years, it's a business arrangement. However, when the series picks up, we find them developing real feelings for each other (which may conflict with the fact that some of their missions involve them engaging in sexual activity with targets for information).
• Where it doesn't: Some people may be uncomfortable essentially rooting for the enemy, though the cast and crew recently acknowledged that and hope you can watch with an open mind. Also, Russell's latent Russian accent, which emerges in her flashback scenes, is hard to take seriously.
• You might like this show if: You were on Brody's side in season one of Homeland.
• When it's on: Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX

Watch a preview and see some photos from The Americans after the jump.

Keri Russell is coming back to the small screen with The Americans, but her new FX series is a far cry from her college life on Felicity. Russell plays a Russian undercover agent posing as an American woman in the 1980s, while Brothers and Sisters' Matthew Rhys plays her husband and fellow agent. The stars and their show-runners came to TCA to talk about the physical demands of playing secret agents and whether we'll be rooting for the other side on the Cold War-set show.

• Since Russell and Rhys play KGB spies working against the American government, the panel was asked who and what we're supposed to root for. Executive producer Joel Fields said that's one of the big questions of the series, but admitted, "It's a little difficult to get used to, [but] we want you to root for the KGB." Russell joked that they "will rewrite history," but the intent is that the audience also roots for the relationship of Philip and Elizabeth (Rhys's and Russell's characters), since they're essentially in an arranged marriage on assignment. Creator Joe Weisberg added that The Americans is "a show about marriage, and the marriage is an allegory for international relations."
• Russell's role is very physical, and it sounds like she's enjoying her stunts, which include kicking a man's head into a wall in the pilot. She said that's "the cool part of this job: experiencing that kind of masculine aggression." Rhys mentioned that their preparation included martial arts training and that Russell's dance background also helped her.
• Rhys talked about the parallels of being a Welsh actor playing Americans on screen with this role as a Russian man pretending to be an American. He said that in both cases, there's "a fine line of being so American that you're drawing too much attention to yourself." Rhys joked that to avoid being too American, he concentrates on "not overemphasizing my R's or wearing too many baseball caps." Russell added jokingly, "That's what we do."

I love this story! The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting Robert Frank's photographs from his landmark 1959 work The Americans, widely viewed as the photographic analogue to Jack Kerouac's beat classic On the Road. Frank and Kerouac both had similar sensibilities, wanting to show the sprawling, diverse, and melancholy side of postwar America. Kerouac, in fact, wrote the introduction to The Americans. Regarding the above photograph, "Elevator — Miami Beach, 1955," Kerouac asks, "That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"

Turns out, "lonely elevator girl" turned 50-something Sharon Collins saw an exhibit of "The Americans" a few years ago and recognized herself as the 15-year-old in the photograph: "When San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art first opened, I think it was more than 10 years ago . . . I stood in front of this particular photograph for probably a full five minutes, not knowing why I was staring at it, and then it really dawned on me that the girl in the picture was me." To hear what Collins has to say about the photograph, read more