Keri Russell Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Even the weather was starting to turn Russian in Washington last week, as the creators and cast of “The Americans” rolled into town to celebrate the launch of the show’s final season on FX. When the series, a period piece about a family of spies from the Soviet Union living under deep cover as ordinary suburbanites, premièred, five years ago, it had the cheery glow of the eighties—the cars were boxy, the computers clunky, and it was always morning in America. “The computers are so old that we can’t get any of them to work anymore,” Matthew Rhys, who stars as the husband, Philip Jennings, said during a reception at the Newseum. “Anything you see on the screens is put on during post-production.”

The real surprise from “The Americans” has been how topical the show turned out to be, notwithstanding its primitive mobile phones and references to Robert Bork’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Five years ago, the notion of Russians trying to dictate what goes on in Washington looked merely quaint. Joe Weisberg, the creator of the series (and a former C.I.A. operative), insists that he wasn’t anticipating the controversies surrounding the 2016 election when he came up with the idea for the show. (The story is loosely based on several families of Soviet sleeper agents who were arrested in 2010 after having lived in the United States for many years.)

“The idea behind the series was to look at the whole concept of ‘the enemy,’ ” Weisberg said at the première. “Let’s look at the worst of them—the K.G.B.—and humanize them. That depended on the show taking place in a time removed from the thick of the Cold War. The fact that the Cold War is back actually complicates the story for us. People ask us how we were so prescient. We weren’t prescient. We were the opposite of prescient.” As Joel Fields, who is a co-showrunner with Weisberg, put it, “There was a point when the world seemed to be moving toward unity and understanding after the Cold War. Everyone was going to join in the shared pursuit of the capitalist ideal. That was the perspective when we started.” But now, the scale of the current scandals engulfing the Trump Administration dwarfs the individual efforts of the Jennings family. “Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube make Philip and Elizabeth look small-time,” Fields said.

As any fan of “The Americans” knows—and several hundred of them braved the weather for a screening of the new season’s first episode, which will be broadcast on March 28th—the real appeal of the series rests on its domestic, rather than its geopolitical, drama. “It’s a show about a marriage,” Keri Russell, who plays Elizabeth, said. “And that’s what people have been relating to for all these years.” What has given “The Americans” an especially piquant charge is the evolving reversal of traditional gender roles. In recent seasons, Philip has retreated from the world of derring-do, embracing instead a simpering self-help doctrine emblematic of the era, while Elizabeth has turned into an ever more remorseless assassin. Marital strife ensues.

Shooting for the final season ended only a few weeks ago, and the cast still seemed to be coming to terms with saying goodbye to their long-term alter egos. Rhys and Russell, who are an off-camera couple as well, have never visited Russia, but said that they may someday decide to make a trip there. Noah Emmerich, who plays the doltish F.B.I. agent Stan Beeman, may even miss viewers berating him on the street for his ongoing failure to catch the spies right under his nose. “ ‘I know, I know,’ I tell them,” he said. “ ‘I’ve seen the show, too.’ ” Holly Taylor, who plays the Jenningses’ daughter (and apprentice spy), Paige, said, “I started this show when I was fourteen, and now I’m twenty. It feels like my whole life.”

Perhaps because Rhys, in real life, speaks with a brogue from his native Wales, he appears most ready to move on. Russell seems more ambivalent about leaving her character behind. (At a minimum, the couple is unlikely to have such a convenient gig again. They would ride their bikes from their house in Brooklyn to the set, near the Gowanus Canal.) “Elizabeth is strong and sexy and powerful,” Russell said. “I don’t think I’ll miss killing so many people. But I’d still like to scare them.” ♦