Was FX's The Americans Based On A True Story?

FX's award-winning series The Americans is steeped in the historical era of the Cold War, but is The Americans based on a true story? Premiering in 2013, The Americans follows Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), a seemingly normal couple living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. However, their normal American facade hid the reality that they were secretly KGB agents working for Russia in deep cover, spying on their adopted home and sending information back to the Motherland.

The great FX series is gripping and tense and was acclaimed for the six seasons it ran. As the Jennings try to balance the normal half of their lives as parents and upstanding neighbors with being spies for the Soviet Union, they play a dangerous and delicate balancing act to keep their identities intact. The story is an incredible one, and the most astonishing thing of all is that there is a strong historical basis for The Americans' premise.

The Americans Is Partly Inspired By Real-Life Events

The Characters Were Inspired By Real Sleeper Agents

The Americans' Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings weren't actually real people. However, they were inspired by a number of people who really exist, one couple in particular: Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who later took on the identities of Canadian couple Tracey Lee Ann Foley and Donald Howard Heathfield. Elena and Andrey were both born in Russia and later met while attending college at Tomsk State University.

After college, they moved to Moscow, where they joined the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) ranks and began their spy training. On the surface, "Tracey" and "Donald" could not have seemed more normal. Donald studied in Canada and then in Paris, earning his master's degree in international business. For her part, Tracey worked as a real estate agent, becoming one of her company's most successful and hard-working agents. The pair even had two children while living in Canada in the early '90s, Timothy and Alexander.

After living in Canada for 20 years, the married couple moved to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1999. During this time, however, they acted as foreign spies in the countries they were embedded in, sending information back to their handlers and contacts in Moscow.

What Happened To The Real-Life Spies That Inspired The Americans

The Real Spies Were Arrested & Sent Back To Russia

While Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov were the two spies that most directly inspired the characters of Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, they weren't the only Russian deep-cover agents working in the United States on behalf of the SVR at the time. In June 2010, after a decade of surveillance by various U.S. intelligence agencies, Vavilova and Bezrukov were arrested along with eight other Russian agents who belonged to a spy ring the U.S. DOJ dubbed the Illegals Program.

The operation, dubbed Operation Ghost Stories, also caught an eleventh Russian agent in Cyprus. However, he skipped bail after his arrest and disappeared. A twelfth — who worked for Microsoft in the U.S. — was deported. Two more were revealed in Russian court documents to have fled the country before the FBI could arrest them.

As for the ten who were arrested, including Vavilova and Bezrukov, they got off rather easily considering the length of time they'd been spying on various countries. In July 2010, the United States and Russia negotiated a prisoner exchange in the neutral territory of Vienna. The ten Russian agents were deported back to Moscow in exchange for four Russian nationals who had been imprisoned in Russia for spying on behalf of the U.S. and UK.

Upon their return to Russia, Vavilova, Bezrukov, and the other Russian agents were awarded the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" 4th Class. Elizabeth and Phillip were never arrested in The Americans, instead fleeing back to Russia before being apprehended. Yet, just like in reality, the show ended with the Russian spies escaping accountability.

The Americans Was Also Very Era Accurate

The Show Was Praised For Recreating The 1980s In America

The premise of The Americans was realistic in its setup, but the reality of the series is that it wasn't nearly as exciting as the FX show makes it out to be. “If you go for 100 percent realism, you’re going to put the audience to bed,” former CIA case officer Rob Baer said (via U.S. News). However, even looking past the storylines added to make the show more exciting, what remains is one of the most historically accurate portrayals of an era of time put onto the small screen. This was what the 1980s looked and felt like.

The showrunners wanted to create a series that lived in a bubble in the early 1980s and not let anything outside that bubble influence it. Joel Fields said that was important for them when writing the scripts. "It's very much about the early '80s. And we don't let outside events impact the show," he said (via NPR). "The themes of the show are very much about the nature of being an enemy and the nature of having an enemy and how human it is to make up enemies."

The Americans has a 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 89% rating at Metacritic (signaling universal ccclaim). Much of the praise goes toward bringing the 1980s Cold War-era United States to life. The production team maintained the look by reviewing old department store catalogs and looking at photos of people's homes from the 1980s. They then shot it in a dark noir style to eliminate anything from modern society that was leaking in. What resulted was an award-winning show that remains a modern-day classic.

The Americans' Accuracy To Real Life Is One Of Its Biggest Strengths

Adherence To Realism Made The Americans Unforgettable

There have been few shows released over the last few decades that are quite as universally acclaimed as The Americans. While there were many aspects that ensured it was received so well, such as the performances of Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, the accuracy of The Americans is undeniably one of the greatest strengths of the show.

The setting of 1980s Cold War America and the paranoia that pervaded every level of society is unique, and capturing the essence of such a difficult time (especially for those working in intelligence) was no easy task. The Americans managed to recreate the tension of a world convinced it was on the brink of a nuclear war perfectly, and it was entirely due to the creative team cutting no corners when it came to accuracy.

The level of consideration when it came to accuracy in The Americans was truly remarkable. For example, the American-born Soviety KGB agents rarely, if ever, speak Russian. While having characters like Russell's Elizabeth and Rhys's Philip speaking Russian in the privacy of their would have been an easy way to inform audiences that they were working with the USSR, this wasn't true to life. Other shows that placed less importance on realism and accuracy would likely have opted for every Soviet spy speaking the language of the KGB, but not The Americans, and it worked in the show's favor.

The Americans was praised for its realism time and time again across its 7-season run. While sometimes this may have risked confusing audience members more used to straightforward storytelling, or who expected more straightforward depictions of characters like KGB spies, the decision to follow accuracy rather than ease-of-understanding worked. It's highly unlikely that The Americans would have been received so well if it ignored historical accuracy, and to this day it remains one of the best small-screen depictions of Cold War era America ever made.