When The Americans debuted back in 2013, aging culture warrior Brent Bozell denounced FX and known left-wing sympathizer Rupert Murdoch for making “heroic defenders of expansionist communist tyranny” the protagonists of their latest series. Describing this choice as “morally sick,” he castigated the show and its creators for whitewashing “Communist genocide.”

Bozell may be a moralizing right-wing blowhard, but you can’t really blame him for being shocked. When else, after all, have we seen “nice-looking fictional Marxist-Leninists” portrayed with relative sympathy on American television?

In the United States, mass cultural depictions of communists have long been uniformly one-dimensional and propagandistic. This was at least part of the joke behind the “Mao Tse Tung Hour” from Paddy Chayevsky’s Network: in 1976, few show concepts would have been more outrageous than one following the exploits of an insurrectionary communist cell.