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"FacebookPinterest\n\nPremiering on Wednesday, FX's new spy series The Americans is bound to disappoint anybody who hoped this blatant Homeland knock-off\u2014and what's so wrong with that?\u2014was gonna be smart, or even stupid fun, as we all suffer through winter's dearth of anything actually good. Instead, it's just a waste of a potentially nifty premise, with Felicity alum Keri Russell and Welsh actor Matthew Rhys playing Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two deep-penetration Soviet agents trained since youth to pass for ordinary U.S. suburbanites and then assigned to marry each other. You know, pretty much Michele Bachmann's vision of Bill and Hillary: The Early Years. \n\nAs the story opens, it's 1981\u2014the first year of Ronald Reagan's presidency\u2014and the couple have been in-country since the mid-Sixties, running a Washington, D.C., travel agency for day-job cover and raising two cute-as-a-button kids (Holly Taylor and Keidrich Sellati) who have no idea of their parents' true allegiance. Increasingly fed up with singing \"ABC\" for the KGB and smitten by the fruited plains of Safeway, Philip wants to defect for big bucks and turn the family American for real; Elizabeth, who's more zealous, sticks up for loyalty to the motherland. In that moody way of sexy women who use terms like \"The Motherland\" with a straight face, she's also prone to treating their marriage as strictly business, leaving poor Philip to make sorrowful ASPCA-solicitation poochy-eyes behind her back as he pines for true romance with his Krapskaya. That's something we know is brewing when\u2014wait for it\u2014Phil Collins's \"In the Air Tonight\" gallumphs onto the soundtrack like a teddy bear peddling free condoms.\n\nFor a gimmicky idea like this to work, it kind of needs a tone. Could be larky, could be all enigmatic and X-Files-like\u2014doesn't matter. Better yet, it could have an ironic slant on what's now ancient history; obviously, neither Elizabeth nor Philip know that the Soviet Union will soon be as extinct as Laserdiscs or Duran Duran. And even though FX is mousier than HBO when it comes to feeding America's prurience jones, it could also be plenty kinky, not that an upstanding fellow like your Critic would ever take such low-minded jollies into account. One reason I'm looking forward to the upcoming third season of Game of Thrones is that I always watch it for the interviews.\n\nSo seeing the variously bungled, timid, or inept variations on all of these gimmes on display in The Americans is pretty depressing. The debut ep kicks off with the kidnapping of a Soviet defector by our hard-working duo, and the whole opening sequence is such a murky botch\u2014you can't tell who's who, let alone spot even vague reasons to feel involved\u2014that I was floored to discover a director I mostly like (Warrior's Gavin O'Connor) was behind the camera. Once you do get everybody straightened out, they're mostly cardboard, especially the Boris Badanov types impersonating Philip and Elizabeth's Kremlin handlers.\n\nRhys, I should say, does have his moments\u2014in the sense that I'd like to see him in a better part. (He may not be able to help it that the moments when he's got to dissimulate his panicked reactions to bad news turn him into a Toby-jug version of Ray Romano.) Russell mostly acts with her cheekbones, and why not? They're damn near the only thing about her that could pass for Slavic. But whenever she whirls into martial-arts derring-do, you can't help thinking that the Soviet spymasters you imagine getting hooked on Felicity back in the day and murmuring \"Can we turn her?\" may very well have been kidding themselves.\n\nIf nothing else, you'd like some good tradecraft\u2014meaning not only the spies' methods, but those of the show's creators. When it comes to ratcheting up the tension, you want something a bit less contrived than having the MVP of the FBI's elite new counter-intelligence unit (Noah Emmerich, who probably deserves better) just happen to move into the house across the street from the Krapskayas. Like a lot of the series, the Wisteria Lane (as in Desperate Housewives) side of that kind of plotting might be funny if it were played for parody, but it isn't.\n\nWell, so far as I can tell, at least. What's frustrating about The Americans is how often it looks like a promising idea that ended up being pulled in too many directions by too many untalented cooks. Maybe FX just couldn't afford Cordon Bleu; among its other failings, the series certainly seems to have been made on the cheap, including some of the least convincing stand-ins for the Washington area (something Homeland does better than most, incidentally) since the heyday of Get Smart. Then again, at least Get Smart had the nerve to send up the Cold War's absurdities while it was still going on. At its worst, The Americans could make you think we spent 40 years locked in a duel to the death with some disgruntled employees from a second-rate Baltimore wig shop."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/fxs-the-americans-aka-the-spy-who-loved-felicity>