I remember watching the premier of Star Trek: Voyager and being slightly disappointed. I was a fan of both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine so I was prepared for the first season of Voyager to stink a bit. And to be sure they mostly did stink. The first few seasons of Voyager were a uneven, but so were both TNG and DS9 as well as those shows spent time trying to differentiate themselves from what had come before.
But whereas TNG and DS9 both found their footing in their third seasons (“Best of Both Worlds” and “The Die is Cast” are two great stand-out episodes from then) to me Voyager never found its footing with similar episodes and never really came into its own as a series. I wonder if part of that was of the series main conceit that they were a lone ship trapped on the other side of the galaxy trying to get home? That they could never really call upon the Star Trek history of what had come before from the Federation to all the different alien species and had to create (mostly) everything from scrap every episode making it hard to build on what’s come before?
Then again Battlestar Galactica would follow this Voyager “lost in space” model a few years later to a much greater effect. 😉
Nostalgia can be a tricky thing. Movies and TV series that deal in the past tend to get the overall big picture right but fudge the everyday little details of life. It’s like how the show The Goldbergs handles the past. That series presents a fantasied version of the 1980s where everything that happened in that decade happened at the same time, where every movie that was released that decade came out on the same that day kids were buying their first Ataris and Nintendos.
Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell in disguise
And having grown up in that decade I can attest that I too get nostalgic for things that happened “back in the day.” I watch series like The Goldbergs and remember things like the kinds of furniture people used to have to the designs of the wallpaper on kitchen walls.
But realistically each decade is about more than furniture and wallpaper and video games and movies. Every decade is like every other decade in that it’s full of change with people looking towards an uncertain future. And that change is a constant through each decade, to the point where what we’re like at the start of a decade is very much different from what we’re like at the end of it.
That’s one of the reasons the TV series The Americans is so interesting. That show too takes place in the nostalgia friendly 1980s yet it’s not a nostalgic show. It doesn’t present that decade in any form of idealized light an instead seems to take joys on focusing on the bad parts of the decade rather than just the good.
The Jennings’ family
There’s so much of a lack of nostalgia in The Americans that I doubt that anyone watching that show would want to spend too much time in their version of the 1980s.
The Americans takes place in the early 1980s in Washington DC where two Soviet spies posing as a married couple, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), have hidden themselves and ingrained their lives into the culture around them. They have kids and live in suburbia but are really sleeper agents who spring into action when called to via messages from Russia.
And their missions can be anything from blackmail to stealing secrets and even murder. And that’s another strength of The Americans; Philip and Elizabeth are the villains of the series. They actively work to undermine the security and stability of the US. And rather than the audience rooting for FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) to find them out and send them to prison, we instead root for the two to escape and live to fight another day.
Noah Emmerich
Elizabeth is much more interested in “the cause” and is prepared to do almost anything to bring the US down that she can. Husband Philip has had to become a bit more realistic, realizing that since they now have children whatever they do in spying for the Soviets not puts more than just the two of them in danger; it puts the whole family in danger.
The first season of the show was focused on what makes two people a couple; is it the act of marriage or is it something else? And the second was about just what it takes for someone to do things they’d never dream of doing in the cause for what they see as a greater good. The upcoming third season looks to be an examination of what a country should be allowed to take from people like Philip and Elizabeth. At what point is what the state wants too much?
Keri Russell
It’s all this that makes The Americans a kind of anti-nostalgia show.
The series almost never plays to the “wasn’t the past wonderful” vibe as so many shows set in the past do. Instead The Americans chooses to focus on all sorts of real life things that still affect us today from infidelity to trust to worries about the future along with things that were 1980s specific like fear about the Soviets to worries about an all-out nuclear war between the US and USSR.
The third season of The Americans is set to premiere January 28 at 10PM on FX. Visit me online at DangerousUniverse.com.
I saw Comet Lovejoy tonight high in Taurus. It’s an easy object to see in binoculars and I could also spot it popping in and out naked eye view too. A guess would put it up to being a little smaller but about the same brightness as M13. It was super-cold at my location too, around 6º, and seemed to be really clear out.
