Keri Russell discusses the upcoming season of the FX drama 'The Americans'

The FX spy drama starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, “The Americans,” is set to debut its second season tonight, and Russell says to expect the new season of the show to focus on more members of a family than just the mother and father.

“If last year was a metaphor on marriage, this year is a metaphor on family,” she told the Los Angeles Daily News. “Philip and Elizabeth start the season with a new kind of unified front with each other. Certainly Elizabeth hasn’t been engaged emotionally before, and I think she has decided this is where she wants to be.”

The show centers on Philip and Elizabeth, a seemingly normal American couple who are actually KGB agents living in Washington, D.C. in the early 1980s. “Americans” also stars Noah Emmerich as their FBI agent neighbor.

'Americans' was critically acclaimed in its first season, with Salon writer Willa Paskin calling the show “gripping” and “wonderfully sly.” 

“’The Americans’ is delightfully cunning, exactly the quality, along with fight scenes and ridiculous disguises, one desires in a spy show,” Paskin wrote.

Russell said she enjoys how her character, Elizabeth, must deal with both the demands of her unusual job as well as the concerns of an everyday wife and mother. The latter comes even more into play this season as Philip and Elizabeth’s daughter, Paige, and Elizabeth struggle to get along.

“What’s fun about the show is that Elizabeth goes on all these spy missions, and then she’s in the car flipping out like a normal mom about something that her 14-year-old girl is doing,” she told the Los Angeles Daily News.

The actress said she doesn’t remember a lot about international relations in the 1980s except for one cinematic aspect.

“I definitely remember the bad guys in all the films being either Russian or East German,” Russell said of the time.