Maybe The Americans is quietly a technophile love letter to the 1980s

Warning: This post contains mild spoilers from the first five seasons of The Americans.

AUSTIN, Texas—On its surface, FX’s The Americans is a sleeper-cell spy drama set in DC during the Cold War. But fans will quickly tell you the show’s more about relationships and the difficulties of family and marriage; the show’s creators echo this sentiment, too.

“If you really look at the show honestly, the picture it paints of marriage is that there’s a lot of ups, a lot of downs, and it’s not an easy road,” showrunner Joe Weisberg says to fellow showrunner Joel Fields. The duo met up with Ars during this summer’s ATX Television Festival, and this author’s recent wedding comes up pre-interview. “He’s right at the beginning; he just got married. I don’t know if I want to lay out for him what’s really ahead.”

“Joe, he’s seen the show,” Fields replies.

“He’s probably thinking, ‘That’s not me,’” Weisberg insists. “But the real message of the show? That’s everybody.”

Through five seasons of this critically acclaimed drama (which recently earned Fields and Weisberg Emmy nominations for writing), they’re probably right. Lead characters Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) have been placed in an arranged marriage, transferred across the world away from everyone they know and love, and forced to start a family. Of course they’ll have some disagreements on how the kids should be raised and maybe go through a few strained periods or separations. But my chat with the showrunners isn’t about the relatable and engaging themes or overall narratives The Americans has found within its clever premise; I want to know about the show’s real subtext. I want to talk discrete audio recorders, tiny cameras, and mail robots—I want to hear about The Americans’ love for 1980s tech.

“We love that shit,” Weisberg says frankly. “You wouldn’t confuse us with full-borne technophiles, but we grew up in the ‘80s. We grew up with this technology, have a great fondness for it, and have fantastic technical advisors [on the show].”

Tech memory lane in vivid detail

The Americans’ overall attention to period detail has become legendary, from its music cues (Yaz!) to its incorporation of current events (Reagan’s Star Wars to David Copperfield and Lady Liberty). Accordingly, Weisberg and Fields’ tech credentials have subtly been on display all throughout the series to date.

On Twitter, Fields often posts writers’ room inspiration boards filled with everything from the origins of “:-)” to space minutiae like Challenger 4 or the Soviet Venera 16 probe. Episode titles have referenced software like Lotus Notes or touchstones like ARPANET, and corresponding scripts weave such entities into the plot as integral details. Most notable of all, the Jennings’ son Henry often feels like a proxy for both the audience and the writing staff’s collective nostalgia—at various points, he sneaks into a nearby house to play an Intellivision, obsesses over a Mattel Electronics-style handheld football game (Tandy’s Championship Football, specifically), and invites neighbor/FBI agent Stan Beeman over to see what appears to be the family’s new Osborne 1.

“We didn’t know each other [in the ‘80s],” Fields says. “We shared different childhoods in the same era in different cities, but we share the same memories and passions for that tech. [The tech] is nostalgic; it takes us back. We had to write in Henry’s passion for the handheld, LED football game because I think both of us craved it and didn’t have it in Junior High.”

“That’s not just us,” Weisberg says. “Any boy who grew up when we did wanted that game. It has a little light that beeped, but when you were 12-years-old there was nothing that had a little light and moved and beeped. It seems insane now—like the dumbest thing you can have—but back then it was a miracle.”

The show runners don’t cherish every prop as much as they do Championship Football

@joel_fields

The show runners don’t cherish every prop as much as they do Championship Football @joel_fields

The writers’ room inspiration board can have tech minutiae as in-the-weeds as this 1983 news of a settlement between IBM and Hitachi.

@joel_fields

The writers’ room inspiration board can have tech minutiae as in-the-weeds as this 1983 news of a settlement between IBM and Hitachi. @joel_fields

Didn’t make it to a mention on the show, but the staff was well aware that on August 31, 1983, Lt. Col. Guy Bluford Jr. became the first African American to enter space.

@joel_fields

Didn’t make it to a mention on the show, but the staff was well aware that on August 31, 1983, Lt. Col. Guy Bluford Jr. became the first African American to enter space. @joel_fields

The writers’ room inspiration board can have tech minutiae as in-the-weeds as this 1983 news of a settlement between IBM and Hitachi. @joel_fields

Didn’t make it to a mention on the show, but the staff was well aware that on August 31, 1983, Lt. Col. Guy Bluford Jr. became the first African American to enter space. @joel_fields

Reel-to-reel wire, folks.

@joel_fields

Our tour of Americans‘ gadget props begins with this typewriter, what looks to be a Smith-Corona Sterling WCM portable.

@Joel_Fields

The most temperamental props The Americans staff works with are actually vehicles, as detailed on an episode of the show’s insider podcast this past season.

@Joel_Fields

Blueprints for the show’s famous mail robot.

@Joel_Fields

Obviously, the ‘80s proved to be a glorious decade for tech, and we at Ars revisit it fondly through things like the TRS-80 Model 100 and the Apple II. But Weisberg and Fields take a pragmatic approach to what appears on the show. Every bit of gadgetry they admire can’t show up on screen; instead they limit what makes the script by allowing narrative to dictate those decisions. So Lotus Notes highlights the particularly bland personality of one of Phillip’s assets, and Championship Football showcases Henry’s curiosity and fondness for American culture. But something as iconic as that famous 1984 Apple ad goes from inspiration wall to the cutting room floor.

“We talked about that big Super Bowl ad, but we usually avoid the big things like that,” Weisberg says. “It feels like you’re trying too hard. Would they have really seen that ad or do you feel the writers trying to put that in to show to say, ‘hey, we know how big that became?’”

“It has to be very integrated,” Fields continues. “We’ll always avoid putting something in if it just draws attention to itself. It has to feel like something they’d naturally be doing—that’s the sweet spot. You never want to pull the audience out of the show just so they say, ‘oh cool, I remember that.’”

When it comes to narrative utility, the tech that most often succeeds is either the standards integrated into daily life in the early ‘80s (say, typewriters or rotary phones) or spy-tech of the era. The Americans takes a rigorous approach to either category when the time comes to display it accurately on screen. Weisberg remembers some of the most heavily researched sequences early on in the show revolved around mundane things like beepers or telephones.

“When we were doing the pilot, we had an outdoor phone, and the question came up, ‘Should it be a dial phone or a rotary phone?’” he said. “No one could figure out the answer. We finally had to call the phone company and ask them to dig into their archives, and the complex response was: at that time, in that era, a lot of the phones outside were both—there were plenty of X phones and Y phones, so we could choose what we wanted.”

For spy tech, The Americans does even better—it goes right to the source. Weisberg served in the CIA once upon a time, and the show’s technical advisors include some of the premier experts on both American and Soviet spy craft from the era. (Christopher Lynch was a counter-intelligence officer for 30 years who specialized in the Soviets; H. Keith Melton literally started the US’s Spy Museum.)

“So everything used on the show like that was actually stuff the KGB used during those years,” Weisberg explains. “[Our advisors] literally send it to us to put on the show—if you see KGB gear or any of that stuff, it’s not fabricated; it’s the actual stuff.”

“For example, in S2, the briefcase where Emmett and Leanne have a concealment, it’s an actual KGB suitcase with a concealment baked in,” Fields notes.