This dissertation analyzes FX’s television serial The Americans (2013-2018)—a late Cold War spy period drama—as a vehicle for exploring the contradictions of today’s mixed analog-digital culture. The serial appears to take a nostalgic approach to the analog past, especially in its attention to the painstaking work of espionage. I argue, however, that The Americans refigures the 1980s as a key moment of continuity between the analog and the digital. I contend that the show’s looming historical deadline is not only the end of the Cold War, but even more so the proliferation of digital networks. The topics I explore in detail in this dissertation—spy craft, networks, and marriage—are all lenses through which The Americans dramatizes the perceived increases in distance, scale, mediality, and anonymity that accompany the rise of digital technology. The show exhibits its own hybrid analog-digital craft by employing the tools of digital serial television to elicit fascination with hands-on analog spy craft, while also bringing actual analog artifacts and techniques into its production.

The Americans remains the primary case study throughout this dissertation, even as I interweave other televisual and cinematic examples, along with discourses from media theory and popular journalism. My methodology treats the single, sustained case study as emblematic of larger cultural and historical phenomena. I further investigate how The Americans intermingles the genres of spy thriller, domestic melodrama, and historical period drama in order to uncover allegorical echoes of the present in the fictionalized past. The long duration of the show’s serial storytelling brings The Americans’ ongoing engagement with a reimagined past into an ever-changing and unfolding present.