FX’s The Americans is a risk-raking drama; after all, it’s about a pair of deep cover Russian KGB agents living in the U.S. as husband and wife – and they’ve played their roles so thoroughly that they have two children!
The Americans’ first season ended last night after taking tits unusual premise and turning it into a riveting thirteen hours of television. On Tuesday, series creator/executive producer Joe Weisberg and Co-Executive Producer Joel Fields spoke with a group of bloggers/journalists about the show’s very successful first season – including that oddly unsettling final scene.
Hello, guys. How are you all today?
Joel Fields: First of all, this is Joel. Joe and I are sitting here gesticulating wildly to each other. It’s very hard for us to resist pressing star one ourselves. Thank you all. It’s been so fun to do this show and we’ve been in a bit of a bubble and reading what everybody’s writing when we can. It’s great to get on the phone with everybody.
Congratulations to you, to both of you. You created an incredible series, one that I’m addicted to and I know a lot of people are addicted to it. It’s just incredible, so thank you, more than anything else.
Where did the idea initially come from to do this? Has this been around for a while, you’ve been kicking it around? Give me a timeline.
Joe Weisberg: This is Joe speaking. In 2010, if you remember, there were a bunch of Russian intelligence service spies who were arrested in the United States and a lot of people were very surprised that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was still sending this type of deep cover spies to spy on the United States. They were posing as everyday Americans. They were, in other words, illegal, like Philip and Elizabeth.
After the FBI arrested them and carted them off to jail, I got a call from the heads of DreamWorks Television, Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey, who asked me if I’d be interested in developing a television show based on what had happened. I said yes, that would be great, I would love to do that, and then I wandered the streets for a little while until I thought of putting it back in the Cold War, which would make it a little more exciting. That was the genesis of the show.
Casting-wise, were you always set on both of them being the leads or did you have different ideas and talked to a lot of different people? Or you knew who you wanted to play the leads?
Weisberg: No, I had no idea. In fact, I’d only been working in television at all for about two years at that point, so even when we were developing the show and even after I’d written a version of the script people would ask that very common Hollywood question of who do you see as the lead. I know you’re supposed to have an answer to that, but I never did. I would always sort of bumble and mumble and say I didn’t know, I didn’t have anybody in my head. I didn’t have much of an idea at all.
Then when it was time to actually shoot the pilot and we started thinking about people and looking at lists of people, two things happened. One is that John Landgraf, the president of FX, had a light bulb go off and went, “Keri Russell.” That was pretty much where the idea of Keri Russell came from. With Matthew Rhys, Leslie Feldman, who’s the head of casting at DreamWorks, saw him in a play. That was the original inspiration for casting Matthew.
Congratulations. That was a wonderfully suspenseful season one finale with some terrific unexpected reveals. I have a million questions, but I’ll boil them down. Of course, more than reveals was that … really nice send off for Claudia, if she indeed is leaving. Margo Martindale has a pilot. If the pilot gets picked up could she remain in that position?
Fields: Thank you so much for the good words on the finale. I’m excited that you guys have seen it. This is Joel. As for Claudia, boy, we love Claudia and we love Margo Martindale. You know, we know that there’s some pilot that we’ve been told about, some CBS, little startup – I don’t even know that you could call it a network – but the KGB has a very, very long reach and we believe that when given the opportunity, they will return Claudia to her rightful position doing what it is she should be doing.
Weisberg: If they know what’s best for them, right?
Fields: Exactly.
One quick follow up. This season, of course, was as much about, as you often have said to me, the story of a marriage as much as about spycraft. At the end of the episode … there is a touching moment when Elizabeth whispers in Russian, “Come home.” What do you see as the main challenge next year? Maybe they realize they can’t hide it from their kids any longer? Any ideas on how you’re going to keep this marriage thing going in an exciting way, in a deep, exciting way?
Fields: It’s Joel again. We were just talking about this. It’s interesting. I just flashed on the fact that Joe and I are sitting in the writers room at the table in the exact spot where we wrote those lines. You know, you work on these shows so intensely and you’re sort of following where the characters lead and looking for what it is you want to say. Having been here at probably 2:30 in the morning writing that theme to now being here on the phone with you talking about how it felt on the other end.
We spend a lot of time talking about next season and what we want to explore. We know that this is a show about marriage, about a marriage and about marriage, relationships and identity. We know that we don’t want to tell the same story next season that we told this season. What we want to explore is the next phase, the next iteration of that. We have a lot of ideas and a lot of thoughts.
We don’t know where it’ll end. If you asked us when we were shooting episode three where we were going to go with the rest of the season we would have given you some very clear and firm answers. What we would have told you about Nina turned out to be exactly where we went. What we would have told you about Philip and Elizabeth grew and changed as the stories unfolded for us, as they led us in other directions. What we look forward to is another exciting, surprising and, we hope, rich season.
Weisberg: At the end of the season, Philip and Elizabeth are on the same page, but I think most people who are married would agree that in marriage you’re on the same page and then you’re off the same page – on and off. This is Joe by the way, but please attribute that comment to Joel.
Fields: I was going to say, that was definitely Joe. In my marriage we’re always on the same page.
You know, I wanted to ask you a little bit about how the direction of the season changed once you knew you’d been picked up and there would be a season two and how much that informed how you closed out this season.
Fields: I’d say none, really. I mean, it changed in the sense that it had its own process. I think there clearly was a weight lifting from us when we knew that the second season was ordered. There was a great sense of confidence and support from FX and we felt – not that we weren’t before – even more challenged to make it great. We certainly didn’t have that looming question that some writer producers have as they go into the end of their season, which is, “God, am I writing the final episode of the show and closing the book or am I just closing a chapter and launching into next season?” All those weights were lifted from us.
There was nothing that changed in terms of storyline that wouldn’t have otherwise changed. It was all part of a process. What the early renewal did was, for us, I think, was instill a sense of confidence and support as we explored.
Can you talk a little bit about Paige? I loved that the final shot was her going down to the room and seeing if there really was laundry indeed there that her mother had been folding. At least that was my interpretation of what she was doing. Can you talk a little bit about your plans for the kids, particularly Paige, who seems to be at least suspicious at this point?
Weisberg: This is Joe. You know, we think a lot about these kids and what it is to be young kids who have been raised by these parents who are telling such an enormous fundamental lie about who they are and how that’s going to affect the kids over time. I at least like the idea that even though they don’t know anything, there’s some level on which, of course, they know everything, they know it all, and it’s a question of how and when it might bubble to the surface. I don’t think we know yet when and how that will be revealed in the storytelling, but the idea of it coming up to the surface in dribs and drabs, in different horrifying pieces is very appealing as a storyteller, to think about that.
You know, I like to talk sometimes about the thing that I found most compelling and fascinating when I worked at the CIA, which is that the families that served abroad together, the parents obviously couldn’t tell their kids, whether it was the mother or father or both, that they worked at the CIA because if you told a young kid that, the young kid would go tell their friends and that would be the end of the assignment. As the kids got older there would be a point eventually where the parents would sit down and have what was known as “the talk.” Maybe the kid would be 13, 14, 15 or whenever the kid was mature enough to keep a secret. It just always seemed so sad and powerful and strange that a kid could sit down at 15 and have their parents say, “Listen, we’ve been telling you this huge, huge lie your entire life” and what that can do to a family. I think different families responded to it very differently.
The idea of a family where the parents are spies and how that affected them, the idea of being able to tell a television story where that was central to the whole dynamic is, I think, one of the appealing things about The Americans. I don’t think that means that necessarily Philip and Elizabeth will sit down and have “the talk” one day, but I think that it does mean that the question of the parents telling the kids such a big, fat lie that affects their whole identity is central to the show.
Fields: This is Joel. I’ll just add to that. One of the things that Joe and I talk about from time to time is imagining either of these kids in therapy in 20 years, suddenly finding out what really happened with their parents and going, “That explains so, so, so much.”
We just had a note asking us to identify ourselves when we speak to you. We will, although we’ll say we’re amusingly often interchangeably quoted in the press now, much to our wives’ amusement. We say that this is a show about an arranged marriage and Joe and I have an arranged marriage, too. Fortunately, it’s one that’s working well.
Weisberg: We have almost the same first name, so that makes it not easy to get us straight.
Fields: That was Joe.
Weisberg: Sorry. This is Joe Weisberg.
Fields: The last thing I’ll say about Paige – this is Joel – is part of the creative appeal and power of what Joe’s created in the show is that there are these personal relationships that are so strong, so interesting and so real, but they also have these great allegorical properties. Paige is this daughter in a fake marriage from this family of spies, but really, you know, in a way all that’s going on in that finale scene in that laundry room is she’s doing what every adolescent does, which is starting to question whether or not her parents are who they really, really said they were, which is something every adolescent goes through and we all can relate to. It’s just that in her case, boy is she right.
I apologize for the wonky policy question in advance. Most spy shows spend an awful lot of time building up to the reveal that a threat is actually as big as someone has suspected that it is all along. You have this interesting moment in the finale when it’s revealed that the Russian fears of this missile program are misguided, it’s fiction, it’s … I was wondering, especially in a season where there’s been a lot of escalation based on the idea that the threat is real – you have these cross-border assassinations – if the next season is going to deal either with the idea that these spy agencies have sort of sent themselves down a black hole or whether there’s interest that they sort of want to keep this Cold War hotter, the way it’s gotten over the course of the season.
Weisberg: This is Joe Weisberg. I don’t know, Joel and I may have different thoughts on that. I’ll give you my answer, which is: the great thing – and I don’t mean great necessarily as a positive, I mean “great” in the sense of incredibly bizarre – about spy agencies is I think they’re kind of unstoppable in their need to work and the need to keep spying. So I think it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes.
For example, we don’t know yet if the KGB is even going to believe Philip and Elizabeth’s intelligence, that it was all true…or will one faction believe it and another won’t? Or will they be sent off to gather further intelligence to see if it’s true or not? I’m not suggesting we’re going to spend a whole other season on Star Wars, but it is certainly true that Star Wars issues kept going and going and going historically and that the Soviet Union continued to fight against it. We do have to stay somewhat true to that history. I think there are still rich veins to tap in the spy versus spy world in a realistic sense.
Fields: This is Joel. I’ll say unhappily for drama between us, I don’t disagree with Joe. We’re in sync on that. Part of the fun of next season is maybe that story. Certainly there are a lot of other spy stories and international intrigues that led matters between the Soviets and the United States in the early ‘80s that we’re anxious to explore. The question of whether or not Philip and Elizabeth’s handlers will believe their intelligence to us is a fun one. Clearly, that issue went on.
Weisberg: Did we answer your question? I feel like we might have out-wonked your question.
Sure. To follow up, one of the things that’s interesting about the FBI plot this season is Gaad talking about this being a hot war, that the civilian agency, the FBI, which isn’t law enforcement, is sort of escalating and it’s only to kill people and becoming more militarized. I guess part of the question was whether they have an interest in keeping their hot part of the cold war hot because it gives them prestige and pride. I was curious about the institutional imperatives there. I’m sorry, I know that’s really nerdy.
Fields: It’s great. Thank you. We love the fact that you think about all these things. We do. Tom Stoppard wrote this great line in his play “Hapgood” regarding the spy agencies, which is, “You people should send each other holiday cards,” which goes to your question. I think on one level you’re right, they have an institutional interest in that, but these are also people who are deeply sincere in their beliefs. I think when you look at Arkady in the Rezedentura and Gaad in the FBI, these are people who know in their hearts that they are fighting for the future of the world and their nations’ place in it. The fact is, as history tells us, because we know we’re sitting on the other side of it, they were right.
Weisberg: I’ll say another thing, too, that as I think you rightly point out, the institutional imperatives to allow these organizations to prosper and survive, but then you also have the bureaucratic imperatives, which are god knows what. Just for the bureaucracies to continue spinning their wheels in all kinds of crazy directions, it makes me think about the fact that when I was at the CIA there were all kinds of very explicit rules. I could probably kick off a few of them, if I remember, things like you cannot use journalists, you cannot use journalists as a cover, you cannot assassinate foreign leaders. There were half a dozen of these different things that were all absolute rules … director of operations.
Very late in my tenure there I somehow stumbled across something – I don’t remember what the exact circumstances were – where I learned that every single one of these was subject to a director’s special memorandum by which he could make all of it irrelevant. You could do whatever you wanted if you got a directors special memorandum. None of the rules were actually rules.
In the same vein, it was always said that the U.S. intelligence agencies and FBI did not do what the KGB did in that our organizations didn’t out and out blackmail people. That was only the really rotten intelligence agencies that did that. Of course, once the Cold War ended and the files all came out, that was just completely false. We just blackmailed people left and right all the time just like they did. It’s a strange world.
I really enjoyed the show. I watched every episode and the finale earlier today. It was really great. I love all the twists and turns in the show. I love how the finale, it was a cliffhanger but it wasn’t one of those really awful cliffhangers where literally you could have ended it with her being shot or Paige finding something in the room. It was like kind of resolved but still things are coming, right? I like that. That’s great.
Fields: Thank you, Suzanne. This is Joel. We actually talk a lot about this in the writing of the stories and the writing of the scripts. Something Joe and I, just in our first early meetings, talked about what do we want the show to feel like and where do we want it weighted. Ultimately for us, we really wanted to do something that was set in the spy world but was a character study and was about the people and about relationships and about themes that interested us. What we specifically did not want to try to do was a super-charged ultra-cliffhanger escalation where with each episode we had to out-crisis ourselves.
Like 24, yes.
Fields: By the way, I, I think Joe, too, huge fans of 24. Maybe our desire not to do that was just the knowledge that we couldn’t, or couldn’t do it as well as they do. We purposely wanted to do something that was different to the extent that if there were cliffhangers, they were more of the emotional and character kind. What’s going to happen with this relationship? What is it like, the universal marriage experiences and family experience that we all face, get expressed through this crazy, crazy intensified life and death world that Philip and Elizabeth and Stan and everyone else are in.
Yes, the relationships are great. You do the story well, too. It’s a good balance. What I wanted to ask you was are both of you old enough to have been adults of that time or do you have to have an early ‘80s expert to help you out?
Weisberg: This is Joe Weisberg. We’re the ‘80s experts. We were both teenagers in ’81 and seem to remember it quite well.
Fields: Yes, we talk about it all the time. It’s one of the things that’s so much fun about the show, being able to see that wardrobe and those locations and the production design and cars, music. The music. We see the wardrobe photos come in and say, “My mom bought me that shirt,” or, “My dad had that sweater.” It’s really something.
Then Joe and I are virtually the same age. I know I remember as an elementary school student being marched out of the class one day being told to stand up and march single file outside of the class and turn. We all faced the red brick walls of the Irwin School in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and were told to cup our hands over our eyes so that if there was flying glass from the nuclear blast the glass wouldn’t get in our eyes. I remember even as an elementary school student thinking boy, if there’s a flash and glass from a nuclear explosion, boy, glass in my eyes is going to be the least of my concerns.
I think that’s something that’s so unique about the setting of this show. It’s set at a time when there was a real sense in the air that the entire world could end in a moment, the entire world, all humankind. It was the time of the big ABC movie The Day After or the feature film Testament or the movie War Games. This was in the national consciousness and both of us grew up with it.
Weisberg: I remember early on when we were talking about this – this is Joe – and out of design, all the period stuff, I said, “You know, the ‘80s wasn’t that long ago” and every person in the room looked at me like I was crazy. Since then I’ve had to back down and admit it was a really, really long time ago.
Fields: This is Joel. I’ll tell you two more things, one about me and one about our writers room. About me, yes, I did own a Members Only jacket at one point in my life.
Weisberg: He still wears it.
Fields: Two, at one point in our writers room we mentioned Oliver North and received a blank stare from one of the younger writers on the staff. Blank. Nothing.
Weisberg: And Al Haig. That whole period was ancient history to our younger writers.
Fields: We just had a whole story about the Reagan assassination, which I remember vividly, Joe remembers vividly. You remember where you were and what happened. It’s hard and sometimes humbling to realize that things, recent memories in your life are actually part of history, but it’s …
Weisberg: It’s a comment, too, that a lot of people make that I really relate to, which is they are slightly aghast that this is a period show.
Fields: That was Joe, which I only say because it was smart.
It’s been a great season. I’m wondering how much time you guys have, how much down time you have in between this and gearing up for the next season. How will you reenergize or recharge yourselves?
Weisberg: Not enough down time.
Fields: That was both of us. It’s gotten shorter and shorter. We were under an enormous crunch – this is Joel – this season with a late pickup, an early air date, a move to New York and then Sandy, which affected our set and wiped out our production office. We’ve been digging out of it as we’ve gone. We’re going to start earlier next season, so there’s a shorter break. I mentioned Joe’s and my arranged marriage. I will say that at one point after we got back into our writers room our wives had made arrangements to take our kids on vacation together themselves, without us.
Not enough of a break, but we will get some break. The hope is that we will be able to unplug and let our unconsciousness do some work as we prepare for next season.
Weisberg: This is Joe. Recharging is a tricky question. I daydream of just lying on the couch and resting and thinking about nothing, but my wife has rightly pointed out that I can’t really keep my brain from thinking about the show. With so much to do to plan for the second season I’m concerned both about all the thoughts rushing in and then finding a way to jot down all those thoughts without my wife going, “You’re working. You’re working. You should be resting.”
Fields: This is Joel. As you see, it all comes back to the marriage.
It sounds like it. Do you enjoy this kind of breakneck pace? Do you thrive on it? Or is it important to you that you get a chance to just turn off the show and your brain for a little while and have a life?
Weisberg: This is Joe. I find it to be a bit of a killer, to be honest. I’m not used to it. I previously wrote novels. The pacing of that is not breakneck. I would get up at around noon and go to the restaurant, order a waffle and relax and write for half an hour. If I was worn out after that half hour I’d go take a two hour walk and maybe that would be it for the day. I like that pace.
Fields: This is Joel. I thrive on it. I can’t lie. Thanks to Joe, I am learning the value of taking a breath and taking a break, which I also appreciate.
One of the most interesting aspects of the show really is the dynamic between all the different relationships with the Jennings kind of being aware of Stan’s job but everyone else kind of unaware of the complex but close proximity of all the players. Then in the finale you see Stan agreeing to watch the Jennings’ kids but he doesn’t really know it because he shot Elizabeth.
Fields: He really owes it to them, doesn’t he?
You’ve done an excellent job of making the relationships and the situations really believable. How do you make sure to keep those interactions and secrets plausible?
Fields: This is Joel. You know, it’s a feeling, ultimately. There’s logic to it. We can tease out the logic to it, but it’s also about the feeling. The show, as big as some of the drama is, we want to keep it grounded in a reality, at least a reality that’s within the context of the show. It has to feel plausible within itself, and we hope it does. I guess our test is if it doesn’t feel right to us it’s not right. If it doesn’t feel true to the characters it’s not right.
We know that with every story we break in the writers room we do we have a couple exercises we always do. One is no matter how interesting, exciting the spy story, no matter how high stakes and high octane the twists and turns are, we always stop and say what’s the marriage story? What’s the family story? If it’s not working, if we can’t answer that question, if it’s not moving us, then we move on to something else. I think that’s part of what helps us keep it true and plausible, at least for ourselves.
Another thing we do is we invert every story at one point when we’re developing them. At some point we always ask ourselves okay, if these characters were CIA operatives, undercover in Moscow in 1981, would we believe what they’re doing? Would we want them to do what they’re doing? Would they have to do what they’re doing? Would we understand it? If the answer is no to that we move on.
Weisberg: This is Joe. I’m just going to add that when you’re talking a spy story, I think not everybody is going to have the same response to what’s believable and what isn’t. I think like Joel said, you go by the barometer of what you find believable. If you feel it, then ultimately that will work for most people.
The test of what you find believable isn’t always 100% reliable. One thing that really caught me off guard was when there were some people who responded to the pilot and said, “Well, I have a lot of trouble. I can’t believe that this family lived right across the street from them. That seems absurd. That seems very contrived to me.” You know, to me, I have lived in Washington and out in these suburbs of Washington. Everybody lives in these condo complexes – CIA, the FBI, people through the foreign embassies, people in foreign embassies are intelligence officers. That just felt totally realistic to me, but it didn’t matter that it felt realistic to me in a way because that was just from my experience. Some viewers without that experience felt that it was not believable to them. I suddenly saw that point later. It’s sort of an interesting test to always think about in the plot.
My audience are screenwriters, so I had a couple questions for you about writing the show. The first one is how do you write main characters who have such a strong inherently unsympathetic trait? In this case, they’re spies and they’re anti-American. Secondly, how do new writers get the details right with the FBI and the CIA and military characters if we have never been in the CIA?
Weisberg: This is Joe. I’ll answer part of the first question, which is that when we were developing the show, for a while we worried about if people would sympathize with these characters. The more we worked on it the more we felt great sympathy for them and liked them, cared about them and the more we got used to them and got to know them it just didn’t bother us that they were on the other side, essentially. We didn’t know how the audience would react. After a while we were just sort of in for a dime, in for a dollar, but like I said, we didn’t know.
Then an interesting thing happened, which is that once we cast Keri and Matthew and saw them read for the first time, our concerns literally evaporated. They just brought so much of themselves and so much sympathy and likeability to the roles that we just were pretty certain that people were going to feel a great sympathy for the characters, even for Elizabeth with all her toughness.
Fields: This is Joel. How can you not sympathize for them? You know they’re going to lose. You know, I think part of the trick – I agree with everything Joe said and will just add – we have that exercise, that inversion exercise where we try not to let them do anything that we feel that a true believer, CIA officers undercover in Moscow, wouldn’t do faced with the same dilemmas.
Interestingly, unlike some other antihero shows that feature sociopathic protagonists, Philip and Elizabeth are believers. It may not be in a cause that we care about, it may not be in a cause that we support, and it’s true, we all know that totalitarian socialism didn’t work, but they do believe and they have their own backgrounds, their own reasons and their own feelings. One of the things that the show explores that we find interesting is the question of where those beliefs come from. We all have logical reasons for our political beliefs, but are they really born exclusively out of logic or are these things much more sociological, much more psychological, much more character-based?
How about getting the details right with CIA, the government and the time period? Did you interview a lot of people?
Fields: Well, the time period, again, Joe and I know the time period because we were there, so that helps, but we also have a terrific team, our production designer, our costume designer, our music supervisor, all of whom help a great deal. Yes, a lot of research. A lot of research into the time period, a lot of research into the history, a lot of research into even the spycraft. Joe knows a lot of details. All of that.
Then you try to put it in and make it feel integrated so that it doesn’t show that you did research. By way of example – this is Joel – this goes to your and the prior question about making things feel true and things being true, Philip as Clark marries Martha. It seems preposterous. It goes right to our theme and it was really fun to write. They did a wonderful job performing it. It gave us some heartbreaking moments and such dramatic stuff to explore.
But that wasn’t, I’m sad to say, our invention. This is something that deep cover Soviet operatives did. In fact, they had a whole program for it called the Secretary of Defenses, where they had deep cover agents marrying secretaries of influential people and intelligence officers, mostly across Europe. It sounds crazy that they did it, but they did it.
The challenge for us was to take something from history that was real, that seemed so preposterous but worked for our story, and try to make it feel true in the context of our own drama.
This show is absolutely incredible and the season finale had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. It was just great.
My question has to do with the Beemans and the relationship between the Beemans and the Jennings. First off, can we expect the relationship between Sandra and Elizabeth as well as between Philip and Stan to develop further next season? I know the later episodes have featured a lot of vulnerable moments between the couples and it seemed like a real friendship was going to develop despite everything else.
The second question has to do with Nina. Will her relationship with Stan continue to be explored or can we expect it to all have been an illusion in the next season?
Weisberg: This is Joe. It was great seeing Elizabeth and Sandra. Obviously, the relationship hasn’t gone that far, but just in the scenes they have together and the little early stages, little embryonic stages of whatever it’s going to be – a friendship, whatever – there’s something great about those two together, I thought, so I’m sure we’ll want to explore that further.
As for Nina and Stan, you know, that’s been such a powerful and intense part of the season, both the spycraft and the emotional journey. Seeing where that goes next season is going to be one of the cornerstones of the season next year.
I want to know, did Keri and Matthew’s remarkable portrayals change the scope of what was originally written or planned?
Fields: This is Joel. I don’t know quite how to answer that question except to tell you that we’re so blessed with Keri and Matthew and with the rest of this cast. Noah Emmerich is astonishing. Margo Martindale, Annet Mahendru is such a revelation coming into this part. Holly and Keidrich playing the kids, phenomenal. We have such a great cast. What I will say is there is nothing we shy away from writing. We feel now, knowing this cast, free to explore anything creatively. We know that anytime we give them a scene they make it better. They find nuance and depth and always make us look good.
I hope that’s an answer to your question. It’s kind of a true and honest one, which is there are times when you find yourself writing defensively and boy, there are times when you just feel liberated. This show is incredibly liberating thanks to this incredible cast.
Thank you. I do have a follow up. First of all, congratulations on an outstanding inaugural season and best wishes on season two. What do you guys want to accomplish this season for yourself that you did or you think that you want to accomplish going into season two maybe for yourselves professionally and personally?
Weisberg: This is Joe. You know, I think when we started out we talked about trying to do a show that would really be about a marriage. In being about a marriage, it would be something that even though it had a lot of high octane spycraft around it and was about a married couple in these crazy, dangerous situations doing these things that almost nobody could really imagine doing themselves, it was because they were, at the end of the day, a married couple doing it – fake marriage, arranged marriage, real marriage, whatever.
Essentially, a married couple doing it that people would relate to and understand and feel and feel that they could see themselves in the kinds of situations that the couple was in. Not that they could see themselves about to die in that situation, but they could see themselves in the conflict with their spouse or they could understand the emotional terms that the stories were being told on. I think not every time or in every story, but I think in an overall sense we did largely pull that off. I think that’s the thing I feel proudest of about the season.
My personal goal is to survive, which I accomplished also. How about you, Joel?
Fields: All of that creatively – this is Joel – and yes, I would just echo that. We wanted to explore relationships and marriage and family. Yes, all of these international conflicts were really through the prism of the family. Personally, this year the goal was to survive and next year I’d say the goal is to creatively, continue and personally, I think if we could make it home for dinner one night a week. It can be any of the seven nights. That would be good.
Weisberg: Thank you all so much. It was a pleasure talking to you guys. Thank you for all your support on the show. We really appreciate it.
The Americans photos by Craig Blankenhorn/Courtesy of Fox