The spy thriller has gone from retro drama to the most prescient show on our screens. As it returns, creators Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields explain why

When The Americans creator and producer Joe Weisberg was a CIA officer in the early 1990s, he became a virtuosic liar. “I lied to all my friends and most of the people in my family,” he told the New York Times. “I told 20 lies a day and I got used to it. It was hard for about two weeks. Then it got easy. I watched it happen to all of us.”

It was the norm; he operated with spies leading double lives. “I was working around people who lied to their kids about what they did.”

Weisberg might still be lying to family and friends today but for his decision, just before he took his first foreign assignment in 1993, to quit the CIA and look after his ailing father. “Only later did I think about what I went through and saw it was fascinating material for a television drama.”

The result is The Americans, which starts its fifth and penultimate season next month. When the show launched in 2013, it seemed to be merely retro spy drama, rooted in the early 1980s of the Reagan-era cold war. Now, the drama seems more like a commentary on today’s “new cold war”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Americans fellows … Series creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. Photograph: Lewis/Starpix/Rex/Shutterstock

On the phone from New York, I ask the writers why they set the show then. “The early 80s work because Reagan was talking about an ‘evil empire’,” says Weisberg. “They were great and wonderful. Later in the decade there was glasnost, and people were starting to get along better so it wouldn’t have made for such a good show.” Co-producer and writer Joel Fields chips in: “When Joe uses terms like ‘great’ and ‘wonderful’ he means for dramatic purposes. In reality, they were neither.”

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Both men, now in their early 50s, were teenagers at the time. The Americans, though, is anything but a nostalgia piece; it intentionally stays away from stock cultural referents; there’s no Flock of Seagulls on the soundtrack, no shoulder pads or hairstyles so big they made their wearers look as though they’d put their fingers in a socket. “Our costume designers were very careful not to make it look like a museum of the early 80s,” says Weisberg.

Now, The Americans has acquired a new currency. Albeit unwittingly, the show elucidates how politics is done in the age of Donald Trump – to today’s political mood of fear, distrust, and demonisation of The Other (North Korean, Muslim and, often, Russian). And, of course, it is broadcast in an era in which Russia and the United States are spying on each other with a similar intensity, if different technologies, to the early 80s cold war. Without intending to, the two men may well have created the most politically resonant drama on TV right now.

When the fourth season finished last year, it seemed that The Americans was merely historical curio. A few months on, though, this drama of secrets and lies speaks eloquently to the queasiness of living in Trump’s post-truth era.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spies like us … Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell in season five of The Americans. Photograph: Matthias Clamer/FX

I suggest to the writers that you could decode The Americans as an allegory with Reagan as Trump, and Soviet spies subverting US democracy as perhaps Putin’s lackeys are currently doing. But they refuse to be drawn. “We don’t like to comment on current events too much. We like to remain firmly in the 80s,” says Weisberg. “But we do think the new topicality of the show gives it a certain resonance for the audience. Even though it’s not what we’d intended, we hear a lot about it and it’s certainly interesting.”

They leave it to us to draw the parallels, such as those between 80s KGB agents undermining the US from within and today’s Russian hackers allegedly corrupting the presidential election from cyberspace, or between the frostiness of Russo-American relations during the cold war and in 2017.

Instead, what drew Weisberg to create The Americans was the chance to dramatise the secrets and lies of his CIA past. Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell play Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, ostensibly travel agents living in suburban Virginia, but actually undercover KGB agents (real names: Mikhail and Nadezhda). With the aim of destroying the US from within they bug the defence secretary’s office, seduce informants, murder US agents and create multiple identities.

In the new series, incredibly, Philip and Elizabeth set up a second family in another town, posing as airline employees in a plot to thwart and perhaps murder a Russian defector devising a biological warfare weapon to be used in wheat crops being traded to the USSR. It’s hard not to watch The Americans and think that if all KGB agents had the energy, ruthlessness and creative acumen of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, the Soviets should really have won the cold war.

Initially, their kids don’t know their parents are originally Russian and only in season three do Philip and Elizabeth tell their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) their true identities. And only because their Kremlin bosses have the bonkers idea of creating a second generation of spies trained to infiltrate the US secret services.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Up, up and away … Philip pilots a new identity in season five. Photograph: Matthias Clamer/FX

Having it resonate across the political spectrum will mean that people are less stuck in their echo chambers Joel Fields

That generational drama of concealment and revelation was one Weisberg witnessed in real life. “After I told people that I had worked there, I started hearing from people who had parents who worked in the CIA. For some it was devastating and affected their whole lives,” he says.

Why did Weisberg become an intelligence agent after graduating from Yale where, among other things, he took classes in Russian history? “I saw it in very black and white terms,” he says. “I wanted to join the CIA because I felt the Soviet Union was the enemy and should be destroyed. I agreed with Ronald Reagan that they were the evil empire.”

It seems odd that he would have embraced that Reaganite mindset, given that he was raised in Chicago by a liberal intellectual family; his father was a prominent civil rights lawyer and his mother a well-known social activist. Why did you get suckered by Reagan’s rhetoric? “I was brought up surrounded by it. If you stood for freedom – and they were attacking freedom and people who spoke their minds – it’s very easy to fall into that way of looking at things. It was a dominant, easy, American narrative for looking at people who were different.” Now that same rhetoric is something that Weisberg has come to question, and indeed challenge, in writing The Americans. “I think that reducing a country and its people to something simplistic led to creating enemies for ourselves,” he says. “It was dangerous in a geopolitical sense, but it was also very negative and debilitating for the individuals. It certainly was for me.”

As for Fields, writing The Americans is, in part, about honouring his father’s politics. His father was a liberal rabbi in New Jersey, Toronto and LA. “In that community,” Fields recalls, “it was not so far left that it was pro-Soviet, which was really a sliver of extremist belief in the 80s, but nor was it black and white: ‘There’s only good, there’s only evil, the Soviets are bad.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scenes from a lie … Paige (Holly Taylor) is coming to terms with her parents’ secret lives. Photograph: Matthias Clamer/FX

Indeed, for all that Fields’s parents were involved in trying to get refusenik families out of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, they didn’t demonise the Russians in the way Weisberg initially did.

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“My father believed more than anything that we share a common humanity. He also believed demonising those people on the other side would just lead us backwards,” he says. So, is The Americans a liberal indictment of the Reagan era? “We’re not looking to do a leftist perspective on the cold war or a conservative perspective,” says Fields. “Having it resonate across the political spectrum will mean that people are less stuck in their echo chambers.”

One last question: how will The Americans end? Perhaps Philip and Elizabeth will return to Moscow to be hero-worshipped. That’s exactly what happened to a sleeper cell that inspired The Americans: in 2010 the returning heroes were greeted by ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin and praised for their service to the motherland. Or maybe they’ll get whacked by the Feds and dumped in the Potomac?

Before Weisberg and Fields can answer, a voice comes on the line. The PR, like some shadowy spymaster, is listening in from Los Angeles. She tells the writers to clam up. In 2017, some secrets still need to be guarded with ruthless, KGB-like efficiency.

The Americans starts 12 June, 10pm on ITV Encore