A. V. Club
In 2013, no show used pop music better than The Americans
By Erik Adams• Dec 3, 2013 • 12AM
http://www.avclub.com/article/the-pa...icans-m-200571
2. Fleetwood Mac, “Tusk” (Pilot)
Of course, the “In The Air Tonight” of TheAmericans premiere is actually the title track from Fleetwood Mac’s double-LP follow-up to Rumors. Interpolated with the Eastern European flourishes of Nathan Barr’s instrumental score, the song lends the proper sense of spy-movie dread to the Jennings’ first major narrative mind****. (And that’s well before Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, and Stevie Nicks get into the pertinent lyrics about infidelity and duplicity.) “My initial inclination when I decided I wanted to set the pilot in the Cold War was to go ’70s, strictly because I loved the hair and the music,” creator Joe Weisberg told The A.V. Club at the end of The Americans’ first season. Certain factors—like the United States’ development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a. the “Star Wars” program)—persuaded him to update to the 1980s instead. This leaves Jennings caught uncomfortably between the Carter administration’s peacekeeping efforts and the Reagan administration’s saber-rattling—a pressure not unlike that felt by Fleetwood Mac as it prepared Tusk, an AOR band outmoded (yet pushed forward) by new wavers and punk rockers dreaming up their own destructive equivalents of Star Wars.