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FX’s drama series The Americans (2013) follows married couple Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington, D.C., during the Reagan administration. They have two kids, manage seemingly standard American jobs, live next door to an FBI agent (Noah Emmerich), occasionally use sex and murder to achieve their goals, and raise the question: Do operatives like this really exist? The answer is a little bit yes, but a lot more no. Deep cover illegal operatives are real, but the series heavily compresses and exaggerates their activities for the purposes of dramatic television.

The family of The Americans on FX

The Americans is created and produced by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer. As a boy, Weisberg had dreams of being a spy like James Bond or someone from a John le Carré’ novel. When he started working for the CIA in the early 1990s, he realized the job was a lot more bureaucracy and a whole lot less action than he had hoped. He eventually left that post and went onto other things. In 2010, when the FBI busted nearly a dozen Russian spies who had been living undercover in suburbs across the country for years, including four married couples, he fathomed the concept of The Americans: a series using the realistic idea of deep-cover illegal spies living regular American lives but who experience the thrills and excitement of those fictional spies he adored as a boy. The result is a series based on a concept that has actually happened, set in a time period rich with real-world events, but which depicts a spy life that is more exciting and interesting than the real job.

“[The FBI bust] was absolutely the inspiration for the series,” Weisberg told Time. “Those spies are called ‘illegals,’ a type of spy that is somewhat unique to Russia’s intelligence service. They were the spies living among us. Some pulled off some real espionage of note, but more often, they would come over, open a business, and try to get a cover going. Then the business would fail, the spies would start telling some lies back home, and then they would sort of disappear. That’s who was arrested in 2010, and Philip and Elizabeth are the 1981 version of those espionage officers.”

The reason for setting the show in the 1980s instead of present day was for believability—people don’t see the USA and Russia as huge enemies these days, but the Cold War was still in full swing during the Reagan era as the President yelled about the Evil Empire. Plus, it’s just fun to do a period piece.

“Spies born in the Soviet Union – like the Jenningses – were pretty good at posing as native-born Americans during the Cold War,” former CIA Director James Woolsey said to US News. Russian intelligence has always been more eager than the U.S. to employ so-called “illegals,” nonofficial spies working undercover in the U.S. “Soviet intelligence had a long-term view of their case officers, and the idea of putting someone in place and keeping someone there until they are needed.”

A scene from The Americans

Bob Baer, a former CIA case officer, told US News the problem with The Americans is that “if you took the real life of a Russian illegal spy it would be boring. If you go for 100 percent realism, you’re going to put the audience to bed.” These types of spies were more likely used to do recruitment work, not the Bourne/Bond-esque adventure duties seen on the show. “They would try to penetrate government and the corporate world,” Woolsey says. “If they met someone who could be a good source, they would sometimes wait until that person went overseas and notify a case officer who would try to pay them for information.”

That sentiment is furthered by Jack Barsky, an East German-born former KGB secret agent and real-life illegal who was sent to the United States in 1978, where he assumed the identity of a dead child, was supplied with money and documentation, and was instructed to insert himself into American society and get close to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In an interview with Slate, he was told he was recruited, received training in things like reconnaissance and information gathering, but had absolutely zero combat, weapons, or fight training. “These hands have never touched a weapon,” he said. “Phillip Jennings is way out of my league. He is multi-talented, he is an engineer, he is a spy, he is a marksman, he is everything. And he’s better-looking than me, too.”

Keri Russell on The Americans

What The Americans does accurately is obsess over the details of the era. When the story involves someone from an Eastern European country, even in a minor way, the writers research which Eastern European country a spy in the Jennings’ position would have been most likely to contact for that particular reason at that time in history. They strive to be authentic with visual details and the environment they create, and they use real historical events and tensions as the tableaux upon which they can create a more elaborate, more engaging story.

But Weisberg told NPR, “our spies are probably busier than any spies in the actual history of espionage. Fictional spies have to stay very, very busy in order to keep people entertained.”

He has also stated the show’s main focus has always been to tell a story about marriage, personal tensions, and the challenges that come along with living in a world of constant lies. “ We wanted to do a show about a husband and a wife and their children who don’t know and how it affects the kids,” he told Time. “We always conceived of The Americans as a show about a marriage, more than espionage, that shows how, even under the craziest circumstances, the marriage still looks and feels like any other marriage. I think Matthew Rhys is this incredible embodiment of a suburban dad and a tough KGB officer at the same time. Keri Russell can be such a loving mom who can turn, on a dime, into this killer. Noah Emmerich, the FBI agent next door, is just as smart and charming as Philip, but he had this crazy undercover life of his own not long ago, so he’s like them in many ways, and you can see the threat he’s posing to them just by looking at their faces. One thing that’s interesting about espionage is that everyone does, on some level, know everything. You can lie, but people in the world tend to know if something’s wrong or something’s going on.”

It must be successful in that regard, as Barsky noted, “You can’t make an entertaining show about illegals without compressing and making one or two characters out of many, as well as compressing the timeline and getting rid of all the boring stuff. All of this is not so real… but when it comes down to the psychology of living in another country, pretending to be somebody else, knowing that you’re not, it’s as accurate as I could depict.”

All that said, The Americans does employ real trade craft and actual concepts for the construction of its characters and stories. From there, it explodes those ideas into material engaging enough for a television audience. Is it realistic as far as the day-to-day life of an illegal spy is concerned? Not at all—but it is rooted in real-world illegal ideas, and its psychological and interpersonal drama connect on a realistic level with the way spies feel about, interact with, and adjust to their duplicitous lives.