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" The eighties sucked. Virtually everyone who lived through them agrees that it was the worst of all decades, and it&amp;#039;s not hard to see why. The empty greed. The brittle pop music. In part because everything about it \u2014 the politics, the culture, the clothes \u2014 was so ripe for parody, and partly because Generation X is a thumb-sucking, childhood-obsessed group of unrepentant nostalgics, the eighties makes perfect ground for a period piece. Unfortunately, The Americans, which premieres tonight on FX, doesn&amp;#039;t fit the bill, though it is highly reminiscent of the eighties in the specific ways that it sucks. We complain about the struggles of our own times \u2014 the recession, the drone wars, reality television, etc. Watching The Americans makes you realize just how much better the world is now than it was thirty years ago. The problem with The Americans is that it feels as if it were made in the eighties rather than made about the eighties. There is an unironic use of Phil Collins&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;In the Air Tonight&amp;quot; over a love scene that was particularly weird. Surely, at this point, Phil Collins can only be used humorously. [Eds. note: Not everyone on the Esquire staff feels this way about Phil Collins.] That&amp;#039;s one of the rules now, isn&amp;#039;t it? The basic plot follows a family of Russian spies living in Washington who have gone so deep undercover that they never speak Russian at home, have American children, and are otherwise invisible. The tension between a conventional suburban American life and going out killing people is played to the maximum, but of course, after The Sopranos and Weeds and about a dozen other shows, the supposedly dark insight into the &amp;quot;real life&amp;quot; of the superficially normal is pretty obvious by now.  Clich\u00E9s fill virtually every scene. Since we live in a television world where many dramas feel they have to innovate to survive, I&amp;#039;d almost forgotten how lousy television used to be when it followed the old conventions. I&amp;#039;ve only seen the first two episodes of The Americans, but there are a lot of knife fights, just like I remember from all those lousy cop shows in the eighties. For some reason, people were obsessed with how you defend yourself with just your bare hands against a person with a knife. Therefore a lot of fights spill into kitchens. There&amp;#039;s also the Cold War, which is dreary. The main problem with using the Cold War as a backdrop to a television show is that we know how it turns out.  But The Americans is most of all a throwback in its cultural inwardness. This is a show in which immigrants who are serving a foreign government want only to live like ordinary Americans. The show&amp;#039;s motivating assumption is that everybody in the world wants nothing more than to be a suburban middle-class white American. Ronald Reagan was the prophet and chief exemplar of this worldview. It&amp;#039;s an oddly ecumenical perspective: No one is really foreign. Everyone is just an American in waiting. This arrogance, rooted in American exceptionalism had massive and unfortunate political consequences in the years following the nineties. It was the line of thinking that led directly to the lack of planning behind the Iraq War. John Bolton believed that you had to hand the Iraqis the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, and clear out Saddam Hussein, and the rest would take care of itself. He did not seem to realize that there were people over there, people who were not like his people. Liberal hawks like Tom Friedman and Michael Ignatieff seemed to find it offensive to suggest that foreign peoples would not, given the chance, choose to become just like Americans. America is the natural state of humanity. Who wouldn&amp;#039;t want to be live in a country like the USA? Two terrible wars have mostly erased this parochialism. American politics is progressive in large part because the country has been willing to look beyond its own borders for policy ideas. Mitt Romney kept shouting that America was the greatest nation on the surface of the earth. Obama instead mentioned that he has family all over the surface of the earth. Americans made their pick. Unfortunately, The Americans, the show, didn&amp;#039;t seem to notice. Its makers really are living in the past. The good news is there&amp;#039;s other stuff to watch now.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a18550/the-americans-fx-review/?src=rss>