Perfect Americans who aren't what they seem

From NBC's

I Spy

in 1965 to

Get Smart

, from

Mission: Impossible

to

Alias

and

24

, there's never been a shortage of espionage series on American TV.

But FX's The Americans is head and shoulders above all that went before.

Created by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg, it has established itself after just one season as one of the most realistic, thrilling, and thoughtful spy dramas on TV.

If you missed the freshman season, The Americans: Season One is due on disc Tuesday; the second season premieres on FX on Feb. 26.

Set in the early 1980s during the first Reagan administration, The Americans stars Keri Russell and Matt Rhys as the perfect American couple. Elizabeth and Philip Jennings run a travel agency and live a quiet life in the Washington suburbs with their two children.

They also happen to be KGB officers who shipped out from Moscow in the early 1960s and proceeded to dig themselves deep into the fiber of American society.

Just to make things interesting, we find out early on that among the Jenningses' neighbors is the Beeman family, whose patriarch, Stan (Noah Emmerich), is an FBI spycatcher.

"Joe [Weisberg] set the story in the '80s because that was the last gasp of the cold war," co-executive producer Graham Yost said in a recent phone chat. "It's a period that hasn't been overdone, and it gave us a lot of fun when it came to the costumes and production design."

The story line stays mostly true to historical reality, yet deviates here and there.

One episode opens with the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. The KGB and FBI scramble to get information about the assassin: Was John Hinckley working for the KGB, Stan's people ask? Or is he, as the Jenningses' KGB masters believe, actually an American agent working for Gen. Alexander Haig as part of a military coup d'etat?

With the help of some brilliant writing and great acting from its leads, The Americans sucks us into the Jenningses' world and makes us care deeply about them. We cheer them on, rooting for them in spite of ourselves, even though they are working to subvert America. Unlike Soviet agents in so many American films, they are devoted to their cause.

"Joe wanted from the very beginning to have Philip and Elizabeth actually believe in what they were doing," Yost said.

But The Americans isn't just an action show. It's also a deeply felt, beautifully shaped character study of a couple in love.

Philip and Elizabeth's marriage - including the children they conceived and are raising - is meant to be nothing more than a cover. It's not a real relationship. Yet it morphs over the years.

"The idea is that they had an arranged marriage that is becoming a real marriage," Yost said. "They are two people who essentially are only coworkers, but who fall in love."

So what will happen to the Jenningses this season?

"The second season is more about the family, both as it fractures from within and also as it has to face a big threat from without," Yost said rather cryptically. He did let slip that at some time in the future, their kids may find out the Jenningses are spies.

"At some point, they will have to have what intelligence people call 'the talk' with their kids."

The Americans: Season One is due Tuesday from Fox Home Entertainment. (www.foxconnect.com; $49.98 DVD; $59.99 Blu-ray; not rated)