Music is the first thing one experiences in the pilot episode of The Americans. Quarterflash’s 1981 hit, “Harden My Heart,” plays as we get the show’s setting: Washington D.C. No year is announced, but the song, with it’s era-specific “sexy” saxophone, tells us we are in the ‘80s. We aren’t sure that the music isn’t diegetic as we see Keri Russell sitting at a bar leaning into the conversation she is having with a middle-aged man who has deluded himself into believing that a woman that beautiful is incredibly interested in him.

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