FX Orders Cold War Spy Drama \'The Americans\'

By DAVE ITZKOFF

The 1980 was the era of Reaganomics, Rubik's Cubes and the possibility that your seemingly straitlaced neighbors were actually undercover Soviet spies. That's the premise of the new television drama “The Americans,” which will star Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys and Noah Emmerich, and which FX said on Thursday it had ordered  for next year.

The channel said in a news release that the show, created and produced by Joe Weisberg (who has  written for cable dramas like “Damages” and “Falling Skies”), will feature Mr. Rhys (“Brothers and Sisters”) and Ms. Russell (“Felicity”) as Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, “two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington, D.C., shortly after Ronald Reagan is elected president.” While they operate a network of informants and hide their true identities from their own children, their clandestine ways are challenged by an F.B.I. agent (Mr. Emmerich, of “The Truman Show” and “The Walking Dead”) who moves in next door.

FX said that production on a 13-epsiode season of “The Americans” would begin in October.