After six seasons, The Americans will conclude at the end of May—but the show’s most beloved character will live to beep another day. That would be the mail robot, the rectangular relic that charmingly and inefficiently roams the halls of the series’s 1980s-era F.B.I. office—and has gained a surprisingly fervent fanbase throughout the otherwise very serious Russian spy drama’s run. Among the mail robot’s devotees is FX executive Jonathan Frank, who has devised a surprising afterlife for the prop: if Frank’s plot comes to fruition, the fake mail robot that stars on the show will be transformed into an actual mail robot, which will be programmed to beep around FX’s Los Angeles office in perpetuity. “My hope is that it teeters on the line between making people happy and not quite annoying them,” Frank said.

That would be a fitting tribute for this mechanical goofball, which took its final on-screen bow a few weeks ago by forcing its way between Noah Emmerich’s Stan Beeman and Brandon J. Dirden’s Dennis Aderholt—making an awkward elevator ride even more uncomfortable. The mail robot is a deceptively talented performer: it’s brilliant at comic relief, but has also been called on for heavy drama in episodes like “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?”—the one where Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) bugs the robot while Elizabeth (Keri Russell) goads an elderly woman into committing suicide.

As the mail robot has endured triumphs, trials, and abuse—dearly departed agent Frank Gaad (Richard Thomas) once kicked it into oblivion—it has been one of the series’s most popular supporting players. The mail robot has its own Twitter account; it’s been the subject of Reddit threads; it’s had essays written in its name. Show-runners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields have had a deep affection for this prop since it debuted in Season 2, but they were gratified to find that they were not alone. “I think love is almost too tepid a description of our feelings for the mail robot,” Fields said in an interview. “We had a certain obsession with the mail robot from early on.”

Fields and Weisberg first read about mail robots in Christopher Lynch’s The C.I. Desk: F.B.I. and C.I.A. Counterintelligence as Seen from My Cubicle, a window into the day-to-day life of a counterintelligence officer. The book describes the real device as a nuisance that would stalk the halls, beeping and bumping into people. (Lynch, a former F.B.I and C.I.A. analyst himself, ended up acting as a consultant on the series.) The real-world Mailmobile, as it was officially known, was designed to be a “friendly machine,” according to an interview Robert Moskin—implementation manager for Dematic, the final producer of the Mailmobile—gave recently to Atlas Obscura. “When the Mailmobile was introduced, we used to encourage companies to have a ‘name the Mailmobile contest.’ Sometimes it’s an acronym, like ‘MOM., Mail on the Move.’ Sometimes it’s a funny name. Sometimes it’s George,” he explained.

It was “too fantastic” a detail, said Fields, and one that spoke to a profound irony: “In a lot of ways, those who were passionate about the mail-robot technology were completely right: that mail would no longer be delivered by a person walking around. They just had it backwards. It wasn’t the mail carrier that was going to be eliminated—it was the actual, physical mail.”