The Americans Trivia | 104 facts about the spy thriller

“The Americans” is an acclaimed period spy drama. It is considered one of the best tv series and one everyone should see.

So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about the acclaimed tv series.

1. The Americans is an American period spy drama television series
2. It is created by Joe Weisberg for the FX television network
3. The series is set during the Cold War
4. It follows the story of Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two Soviet KGB intelligence officers posing as an American married couple living in Falls Church, a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., with their children, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati)
5. The show also explores the conflict between Washington’s FBI office and the KGB Rezidentura there
6. It follows the perspectives of agents on both sides
7. Including the Jennings’ neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent working in counterintelligence
8. The series begins in the aftermath of the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in January 1981
9. It concludes in December 1987, shortly before the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
10. The Americans premiered in the United States on January 30, 2013
11. The series concluded on May 30, 2018
12. It ended after six seasons
13. The series was acclaimed by critics, many of whom considered it among the best of its era
14. Its writing, characters, and acting were often singled out
15. The series’s final season earned Rhys the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
16. While Weisberg and co-lead writer Joel Fields won Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
17. It was also awarded the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Drama
18. Additionally, Margo Martindale twice won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her performances in the third and fourth seasons
19. It also became one of the rare drama shows to receive two Peabody Awards during its run
20. The Americans, a period piece set during the Reagan administration, was outlined by series creator Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer
21. The series focuses on the personal and professional lives of the Jennings family—a married couple of Soviet deep-cover agents placed in the Washington, D.C. area in the 1960s and their unsuspecting, American-born children
22. The story picks up in the early 1980s
23. The show’s creator has described the series as being essentially about a marriage
24. Joel Fields, the other leading executive producer on the writing team, described the series as working different levels of reality
25. These are the fictional world of the marriage between Philip and Elizabeth, and the real world involving the characters’ experiences during the Cold War
26. In 2007, after leaving the CIA, Weisberg published An Ordinary Spy, a novel about a spy who is completing the final stages of his training in Virginia and is being transferred overseas
27. After reading Weisberg’s novel, executive producer Graham Yost discovered that Weisberg had also written a pilot for a possible spy series
28. Weisberg was fascinated by stories he had heard from agents who served abroad as spies, while raising their families
29. He was interested in bringing that concept to television, with the idea of a family of spies, rather than just one person
30. Yost read the pilot and discovered that it was “annoyingly good”, which led to developing the show
31. Weisberg says the CIA inadvertently gave him the idea for a series about spies
32. The job at CIA, which Weisberg later described as a mistake, has helped him develop several storylines in the serie
33. Basing some plot lines on real-life stories
34. And integrating tactics and methods he learned in his training, such as dead drops and communication protocols
35. Weisberg was partially influenced by the 2010 events of the Illegals Program to write a pilot script for the series
36. His research material included notes on the KGB’s Cold War left by Vasili Mitrokhin and conversations with some of his former colleagues at the CIA
37. However, in a departure from the circumstances involving the Illegals Program, he said he had opted to set the story in the early 1980s because “a modern day [setting] didn’t seem like a good idea”
38. In a 2017 interview Weisberg said that the show tried hard to resist the influence of the current political climate
39. Weisberg said he had no idea about who would star in the series before casting began
40. FX president John Landgraf had the idea to cast Keri Russell in the series
41. Leslie Feldman, the head of casting at DreamWorks, saw Matthew Rhys in a play and suggested him to Weisberg
42. Russell and Rhys had met briefly at a party years before, but were not fully introduced
43. They both were attracted to the series because of its focus on the relationship between their characters
44. Noah Emmerich was initially hesitant about taking a role in the series
45. His friend, Gavin O’Connor, who directed the pilot episode, convinced him to take a closer look at the role
46. Emmerich stated that he responded to the aspect of marriage and family
47. After recurring in the first season, Susan Misner, Annet Mahendru, and Alison Wright, who play Sandra Beeman, Nina, and Martha Hanson, respectively, were promoted to series regulars beginning with season two
48. After recurring in the first two seasons, Lev Gorn, who plays Arkady Ivanovich, was promoted to series regular for season three
49. Weisberg, one of the executive-producing showrunners and head writers, wrote the first two episodes of the series
50. Landgraf, who did not know Weisberg but liked the series, suggested to Weisberg that he work alongside Joel Fields as co-showrunner and the other head writer
51. Fields, in turn, persuaded TV writer Joshua Brand, with whom he had been working on a new pilot, to join the show’s writing team as consulting producer shortly after the start
52. Between them, Weisberg, Fields, and Brand wrote or co-wrote ten of the first season’s thirteen episodes
53. In the second season, Gibson wrote one episode
54. The show added other producers to the writing team: screenwriter and journalist Stephen Schiff, playwright and children’s book author Peter Ackerman, and playwright Tracey Scott Wilson
55. All six of those writers (Weisberg, Fields, Brand, Schiff, Ackerman, and Wilson) remained with the show throughout its run
56. In addition, playwright and Americans story editor Hilary Bettis was added to the writing staff in season 5
57. And Americans script coordinator Justin Weinberger and showrunner’s assistant Sarah Nolen were added to the writing staff in the sixth and final season
58. The main characters of the show, despite being Soviet KGB officers, have to behave as American-born citizens, and therefore do not generally speak Russian on-screen
59. But other Soviet agents, immigrants and—later in the show—ordinary Soviet people, converse in Russian
60. Joe Weisberg explained that achieving believable Russian pronunciation was very important because the show was “so much centered on the world of the Russian Russians and the Russian illegals”
61. In most cases, Russian was the native language for the actors playing Soviet characters
62. Other actors mastered their lines to sound almost native
63. In particular, Peter von Berg, who played Vasili Nikolayevich, has experience with Russian plays and was an accent coach
64. General Zhukov was played by a Polish actor
65. Annet Mahendru, who played Nina, has a Russian mother and speaks six languages
66. Mahendru praised Matthew Rhys for his efforts in delivering a few phrases in Russian
67. Weisberg underscored the importance of the authenticity
68. The series filmed in New York City at Eastern Effects Studios in Gowanus, Brooklyn, with Brooklyn street locations in Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill
69. Other shooting locations included: Prospect Park, Astoria, Washington Heights, Mamaroneck, Coney Island Avenue, Kew Gardens, Morningside Heights, Farmingdale and Staten Island
70. Shooting of the pilot episode began in May 2012 and lasted until mid-June
71. Filming began for the rest of the first season in November 2012 in the New York City area
72. The production used location shots to simulate a dramatic setting of Washington, D.C. Early
73. Filming was delayed by flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy
74. Filming for the second season commenced in October 2013
75. Some scenes in the fifth and sixth seasons were filmed in Moscow
76. Over the course of its run, the series received widespread critical acclaim
77. With several publications naming it the best show on television
78. The American Film Institute listed The Americans as one of the top ten television series of 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018
79. Brian Tallerico from RogerEbert.com argued that while there are many good shows in the era of Peak TV, The Americans was the greatest then on television, and “one of the few that earns the capital-G Great title”
80. Insider named it one of the “50 TV shows everyone should watch in their lifetime”
81. After it ended its six-season run, Tim Goodman from The Hollywood Reporter considered The Americans to be among the “Hall of Fame” dramas
82. He stated it was one of his top 5 favorite television dramas of all-time
83. IndieWire and Paste named it the best FX TV series of all-time
84. The New York Times named the series one of the best 20 TV dramas since The Sopranos
85. Vice called it “The Sopranos of this decade”
86. Carrie Wittmer from Business Insider declared it one of the greatest series ever and “the end of TV’s Golden Age”
87. In September 2019, The Guardian ranked the show 43rd on its list of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century
88. The publication stated that the “gorgeous, slow-burning drama” was “terminally overlooked in favour of flashier, flimsier fare”
89. Over the course of the series, The Americans received 18 Emmy nominations
90. For its fourth and sixth seasons, the series was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series
91. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys were each nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress and Actor in a Drama Series, respectively, for the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons
92. Rhys won the award for the sixth season
93. The prior omissions that the show had received at the Emmys were considered to be snubs by the Emmys in the drama and acting categories by critics
94. Margo Martindale was nominated four times and won twice for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series
95. Alison Wright received a nomination in the same category for the fifth season
96. The show received four nominations for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, for “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” written by Joshua Brand
97. And Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg were nominated for the award three consecutive years for the fourth, fifth, and sixth-season finales
98. Fields and Weisberg won the award for the series finale, “START”
99. Nathan Barr also received a nomination for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music for the first season
100. The Americans was strongly praised for its writing
101. The series was nominated for four Writers Guild of America Award for Television: Dramatic Series awards
102. The series won in both 2016 and 2018
103. The Americans won a rare second Peabody Award, “for ending one of TV’s best dramas with one of the television’s best series finales”
104. Thus, becoming the first drama series since Breaking Bad to win two Peabody Awards during its run