{"id":2326,"date":"2017-02-11T21:41:47","date_gmt":"2017-02-11T15:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=2326"},"modified":"2017-02-11T21:41:47","modified_gmt":"2017-02-11T15:41:47","slug":"the-americans-a-new-reality-tv-show-starring-melania-and-donald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/02\/11\/the-americans-a-new-reality-tv-show-starring-melania-and-donald\/","title":{"rendered":"&quot;The Americans&quot;: A New Reality TV Show Starring Melania and Donald"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So FX has a series titled <em>The Americans<\/em>, now in Season Five, in which a pair of Soviet spies are masquerading as a married American couple. I&#8217;ve always liked the female lead, Keri Russell, who was in the charming indie movie, <em>Waitress<\/em>, back in 2007. She makes for a terrific spy, which is fun . . . as long as it&#8217;s fiction.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-2327\" title=\"The-Americans-600x350\" src=\"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/The-Americans-600x350.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"350\" \/><br \/>\nAs fact\u2014even &#8220;alternative fact&#8221;\u2014the result isn&#8217;t quite so funny. (Okay, just a little bit. Lampooning Donald is like Ham on Wry.) Maybe it&#8217;s just me, but I&#8217;m starting to have the sneaky suspicion that what we&#8217;re experiencing with the U.S. presidency right now is more like a reality-TV version of the show, with worse acting\u2014note Donald&#8217;s creepy handshake of the Japanese PM, Conway&#8217;s shameless hawking of Ivanka&#8217;s &#8220;products&#8221; on Fox News, the Orwellian doublespeak foaming out of the mouth of Sean Spicer. I mean, look at this picture: Doesn&#8217;t Melania look like a Cover Girl spy, a Victoria&#8217;s Secret version of the Angela Lansbury spy-mom\/puppeteer in <em>The Manchurian Candidate<\/em> (1962)?<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-2328\" title=\"170210185955-president-trump-arrives-in-west-palm-beach-with-japanese-prime-minister-shinzo-abe-for-weekend-at-mar-a-lago-exlarge-169\" src=\"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/170210185955-president-trump-arrives-in-west-palm-beach-with-japanese-prime-minister-shinzo-abe-for-weekend-at-mar-a-lago-exlarge-169.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"780\" height=\"438\" \/>Melania is doing her best to remind us all of Boris &amp; Natasha from <em>Rocky &amp; Bullwinkle<\/em> fame, right? Or Helene, Pierre&#8217;s devious wife in Tolstoy&#8217;s <em>War and Peace<\/em> (1869). Hear the voiceover? A Russian accent hissing, &#8220;You stupid Americans. We steal country out from under your nose, and laugh at you. Ha ha ha! Welcome to gulag, Yankee pig dog!&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So FX has a series titled The Americans, now in Season Five, in which a pair of Soviet spies are masquerading as a married American couple. I&#8217;ve always liked the female lead, Keri Russell, who was in the charming indie &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/02\/11\/the-americans-a-new-reality-tv-show-starring-melania-and-donald\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,30],"tags":[137,155,171,177,181],"class_list":["post-2326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-tv","category-tolstoys-war-and-peace","tag-politics","tag-the-americans-on-fx","tag-the-manchurian-candidate","tag-the-trumps","tag-tolstoys-war-and-peace"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}