People walk past an electric billboard advertising the television show "The Americans", in New York's Times Square on January 29, 2015. The show, a critically acclaimed thriller about husband-and-wife KGB agents who kill, spy and lie in suburban Washington DC, originally aired for six seasons from January 30, 2013 to May 30, 2018.

The story picks up in the early 1980s, in the midst of the Cold War during the Reagan administration. The series follows the personal and professional lives of a married couple of Soviet deep-cover agents placed in the Washington, D.C. area in the 1960s, as well as that of their unsuspecting, American-born children.