The showrunner explained that FX has given “The Americans” the support and they have been given the mandate to do what is right for the show and make those choices based on what’s important for the story and what they want to do creatively.
Set in the early 80s during the Cold War, “The Americans” is the story of Elizabeth and Philip, two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple living in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC with their unsuspecting children and their neighbor Stan Beeman, played by Noah Emmerich, an FBI agent working in counter-intelligence.
“The Americans” was created by Joe Weisberg, who happens to be a former CIA officer. Amid its spy setting, Weisberg aimed to tell the story of a marriage. The series focuses on the personal and professional lives of the Jennings, sometimes incorporating real-life events into the narrative.
At the core of “The Americans” is a marriage story. International relations are just allegories for the human relations. When married couple struggles with their marriage, it feels like life or death because for Philip and Elizabeth, it seems like it is.
Fields also described the series as working different levels of reality: the fictional world of the marriage between Philip and Elizabeth, and the real world involving the characters’ experiences during the Cold War.