Since Joe Weisberg was an ex-C.I.A. agent, every script he writes must be submitted to the Publications Review Board at the C.I.A. before filming begins.
Joe Weisberg says the CIA inadvertently gave him the idea for a series about spies, explaining, "While I was taking the polygraph exam to get in, they asked the question, 'Are you joining the CIA in order to gain experience about the intelligence community so that you can write about it later'-which had never occurred to me. I was totally joining the CIA because I wanted to be a spy. But the second they asked that question... then I thought, 'Now I'm going to fail the test.' " The job at CIA, which Weisberg later described as a mistake, has helped him develop several story-lines in the series, basing some plot lines on real-life stories, and integrating tactics and methods he learned in his training, such as dead drops and communication protocols.
According to Joe Weisberg, despite its spy setting, the series seeks to tell the story about a marriage: "The Americans is at its core a marriage story. International relations is just an allegory for the human relations. Sometimes, when you're struggling in your marriage or with your kid, it feels like life or death. For Philip and Elizabeth, it often is."
Joseph Weisberg was a case officer for the C.I.A. in the early 1990s.
In 2007, after leaving the CIA, Weisberg published An Ordinary Spy, a novel about a spy who is completing the final stages of his training in Virginia and is being transferred overseas. After reading Weisberg's novel, executive producer Graham Yost discovered that Weisberg had also written a pilot for a possible spy series. Weisberg was fascinated by stories he had heard from agents who served abroad as spies, while raising their families. He was interested in bringing that concept to television, with the idea of a family of spies, rather than just one person. Yost read the pilot and discovered that it was "annoyingly good", which led to developing the show.