Spy v Cylon: The Americans

Watched the first three episodes of the FX series The Anericans and it remains to be seen whether we'll stay with this or jump right into season 2 of House of Cards. The Americans is certainly entertaining and fast paced but, despite its loose approximation of certain actual events, it's a series that does not stand up to scrutiny. The less you think about it the better, but here goes. The real spy cases on which this is based involved, as I recall, people living in the U.S. who were Russian and living as Russians, but as grad students, business people, and so forth - nobody suspected that they might be sending info back to Soviet headquarters. This series takes that premise a megastep forward: certain young people were recruited in the USSR from childhood, trained in martial arts and in English, and sent to the U.S to live not as Russian immigrants but as native-born American citizens, though they are KGB agents trained to get info and send it back to the beloved motherland. This premise is ridiculous on a # of levels, not the least of which is it's almost inconceivable that these people who immigrated to the U.S. at age 20 or so, posing as a married couple, could Americanize so completely and thoroughly and invent an entire history (e.g., they have two children - was there never any talk about family background, home town???). Also, having gone to all that trouble, what kind of info could these people actually get? Isn't much more efficient to bribe U.S. citizens in the intelligence community to become double agents (this actually worked, obviously)? This series, and to a lesser extent Homeland (and also the recent British movie on a very similar theme - a Soviet citizen poses for her whole lifetime as a native-born Brit - wow, these guys are good at languages!) are really all based on the fear so well dramatized in Battlestar Gallactica. These spies are like Cylons: They live among us, look and act just like us, but they are alien and dangerous. That's what makes this series click, to the extent it does - it's creepy and odd, but on any examination it become pretty ridiculous - especially the uber-sexuality of the two leads and their seemingly supernatural ability to fight of large bands of armed assailants.