The profound anti-nostalgia of FX's The Americans

In the fourth season of FX's superb, perpetually underappreciated The Americans, preteen Henry Jennings (Keidrich Sellati) feels overlooked by his work-obsessed parents (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) and turns to his neighbor and newfound mentor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) for some adult guidance. Much as another boy might turn to an older brother or a favorite uncle, Henry asks Stan how he met the woman who would eventually become his wife, and Stan describes the night in great detail, beaming as he relishes the memory.

But when Henry reaches his follow-up question — "And then what happened?" — The Americans returns to the unsentimental terrain that offers the show its surest footing. "We got married, and had Matthew, and got divorced," Stan replies, stone-faced.

That exchange is The Americans in microcosm. From its first episode, FX's drama has reserved little space for wistfulness. In an age of entertainment that is largely defined by nostalgia, The Americans derives its power from its refusal to lionize the past.

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The Americans, which is set in the midst of the Cold War, begins its fourth season in the immediate aftermath of a key U.S. policy shift, as President Ronald Reagan finishes off a decade-plus of détente with his famed "Evil Empire" speech. But while the story is set in a recent past, The Americans looks forward. It suggests a counterpoint to the foremost feature of our own political moment, in which the challenge to the establishment — on both sides of the aisle —is, at least in part, backward-looking. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump promises to "Make America Great Again" — and to revive a kind of angry populism reminiscent of an earlier and more intolerant era. Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders seeks to reverse "the 40-year decline of our middle class" by rebuilding the social compact that emerged from the New Deal, World War II, and the Great Society. If we are, as observers claim, in the midst of a "revolution," it is one with roots in both the term's modern political usage and its Latin origin: revolvere, "to roll back."

By contrast, The Americans — co-created by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg — focuses on contingencies and complications, framing the past in the present tense. As the season begins, Henry's parents — Soviet spies posing as American travel agents Philip and Elizabeth Jennings — embark on a mission involving a potent biological agent. The stakes are profoundly high, but the new season moves gradually; the first four episodes offer a condensed version of 10 days in the lives of the characters, sometimes approaching the effect of real time. The result is that the fallout from the third season's tense finale — in which Paige (Holly Taylor), the Jennings' teenage daughter, divulged her parents' secret to her pastor — is dealt with ad hoc. It's instinct, not reason or planning, that propels the series, an emphasis on the chaos of the immediate experience, as tonight's premiere makes explicit.

The Americans recognizes that nostalgia is a form of misremembering — a way of applying order to events that seemed, at the time, to follow no particular logic. In the years since the collapse of the USSR, we've been taught to see the march through glasnost and perestroika to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a logical, inevitable outcome. But the series presents history more accurately: as a muddle, with Reagan's aggression balanced out by Soviet repression. The Communist threat, as Stan understands it, is not an abstraction of dominoes and Iron Curtains; it's the capture and confinement of his former lover, Nina (Annet Mahendru), in a faraway Soviet prison. The Americans has no patience for the romance of retrospect, and no interest in justifying the destruction wrought by either side in the name of peace.

It's a quality that stands out against the idyllic past described by politicians and revived by TV remakes — a bleak, brutal series of exigencies, with the solutions determined by the same frail faculties that limit the possibilities of the present: humans. "There are no good choices here," the Jennings' loyal KGB handler laments to his superior, after Paige's confession introduces yet another dangerous element to the equation. "First there are no choices, then there are no good choices," Claudia replies. "I'd say we're making progress."

In today's campaign season marked not by facts but by fantasies, The Americans is a potent corrective. It's a series in which the emphasis on choices — individual, irrevocable choices — suggests a definition of "revolution" absent from the 2016 election's bombast. "To revolve" is to spin in a kind of infinite present; in The Americans, the next turn is the only one that matters. Asking and answering, "And then what happened?" with brusque assurance, the series emerges as a clear-eyed antidote to the central delusion of today: the pledge to resurrect the past in spite of its many shortcomings.

Season four of The Americans premieres Wednesday, March 16 at 10 p.m. on FX.