The Americans Special Features Tidbits

 

From the returning shows of this year’s midseason, I’m most excited about The Americans. I want to badly see the great Margo Martindale, see the new wigs and costumes that they will use, and see the blossoming love between Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys… and also their characters Elizabeth and Philip.

If you haven’t seen the first season, go buy the DVD or the Blu-ray for 2 reasons, one, so you can watch it over and over again with very high quality, and two, the special features and extras are amazing. One of the best parts of the extras feature is the explanation of what is really going on between Clark and Martha, the 2nd best couple in the show. As you may already know, spies really did marry secretaries that worked in government agencies to get more information, but quit listening to me, go get the DVD!

They also shared other interesting things about the show, if you want to know them right away, here are some of the exciting things I saw on the DVD:

The blooper reel was funny, and it involves a lot of dancing.

Joel Fields, executive producer of the show explains the CIA’s involvement in the show. “All of the scripts that Joe writes, and anything that Joe and I write together, have to be submitted to the CIA for review, so we’ll finish a script or he’ll finish a script, and it gets sent to the CIA for them to review and approve it. So far they’ve been swift and great, actually. … Sometimes in the writers’ room, when we’re breaking a story, if Joe doesn’t like how the story is being broken, if it doesn’t feel genuine to him, he’ll hold up his hand like this [gestures with his hand in a ‘C’ shape], and that means he’s holding up his ‘spy card,’ which tells us that, based on his great CIA experience, we’ve got to re-break the story in a more true way.”

The writers always insert a story about marriage in every episode. They also commented on Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage problems: “When we decided to split them up in the middle of the season, one thing we didn’t anticipate is that they’d stay broken up for so long, and it would take until the finale for them to come back together.”

Remember Trust Me? The episode where the couple intentionally rammed their car to a tree? It turns out that the tree was a prop which just fell over on the first take so they had to re do it.

Also another interesting thing about the show is that Steven Spielberg watches the rough cut and reads the script. He was so into it that he “got in touch” and offered some constructive criticisms. He was most helpful during the editing of the finale car chase because he actually gave his ideas. Mr. Spielberg was paid $1,700 for his contributions to the finale episode, which is sweet considering it was FREAKING STEVEN SPIELBERG!

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