Vladimir V. Putin is great for television.
And that’s not just because the Russian president is a former K.G.B. officer with a flair for grandiosity. Mr. Putin isn’t just a scuba-diving, Siberian-bear-hunting, bare-chested equestrian. He also acts like a Soviet-era potentate, repressing dissidents, jailing rivals and casting the United States as a contemptible enemy.
That may be bad for Russian democracy, the West and more imminently Ukraine, but Mr. Putin deserves credit as a muse for American entertainment.
Vlad the Invader, as some call him, almost single-handedly made Russia a nemesis during the Sochi Olympics. It’s a role Russia has also been playing on all sorts of dramas — and many were written even before Mr. Putin gave asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive national security contractor.
Before Mr. Putin took power, Russia had taken a dip in relevance, both on the world stage and on the screen. In the chaotic years of Boris Yeltsin and post-Soviet laissez-faire, movies and television mostly depicted Russians as mobsters, prostitutes and the occasional disaffected émigré scientist.
Now, the Kremlin is once again controlled by an autocrat and has returned to the top of the enemies list — not just in dramas set in the past, but also in those set in the present and future.
Credit also goes to “The Americans,” an excellent FX period drama about undercover K.G.B. spies in the era of Ronald Reagan that has attracted a devoted following and imitators. Last January, ABC showed “The Assets,” a mini-series about a real-life spy, Aldrich Ames, an American counterintelligence officer who sold secrets to Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s.
That, too, was a period piece. The most interesting thing about “Allegiance,” a new NBC drama this fall, is that it is set not in the Cold War past but in a Cold War present. Hope Davis plays a former Russian spy who quit intelligence work to marry an American but is coerced by her former bosses to return to espionage when her son joins the C.I.A.
The Russia intelligence service may now call itself the S.V.R. and not the K.G.B., but on this show, at least, not much else has changed since the days of Lavrentiy Beria. “We may be called S.V.R., but the old rules of the organization are the same,” a Russian spy master hisses at a turncoat agent as he prepares to burn him alive in an incinerator.
“The Last Ship,” a TNT thriller that had its premiere on Sunday, drags the superpower standoff into the future: Even in a post-apocalyptic world, where most of the world’s population has been wiped out by virus, Moscow cannot be trusted.
On that show, Americans who survived contagion on a naval destroyer find that even when there are no governments left, Russian officers on a nuclear-powered battle cruiser sneer at international cooperation.
When the American captain warns his Russian counterpart, a vice admiral, that the Russian ship won’t have enough food, the vice admiral asks one of his officers to hand him his pistol. As the Americans stare, transfixed, the vice admiral shoots the officer in the head. “One less mouth to feed,” he explains. (He also fires a nuclear missile at France.)
And in a flashback to the Red-scare days — when scientists like Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall tried to prevent the United States from having a monopoly on nuclear weapons by sneaking atomic secrets to the Soviet Union — on “The Last Ship,” scientists battling the virus go behind the backs of their governments to secretly exchange information.
What’s paradoxical about the newly demonized Russia is that in real life the country is no longer an outright enemy or even the rival superpower (even if in the 2012 campaign, the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, called Russia this country’s biggest geopolitical foe). Tensions between Washington and Moscow are high, but terrorism, the Middle East and rogue nations like North Korea are a more immediate menace to national security. That makes it easier — and more fun — to paint the Kremlin red.
The image of Russian iniquity is so deeply embedded in the collective unconscious that it even pops up in a series on BBC America about the court of Louis XIII. “The Musketeers,” a reimagining of the Dumas stories, invents a plotline where bomb-carrying revolutionaries plot to assassinate the French king. In real life, a Catholic fanatic, François Ravaillac, succeeded in killing Henri IV, the father of Louis XIII. The creators of “The Musketeers” chose a Russian name, Vadim, for their French villain, probably because “Vadim” says anarchist conspirator in a way that Pierre or Jean does not.
Television and entertainment took Russia less seriously when it was the Soviet Union and really was the nation’s most dangerous adversary. M.A.D. in those days stood for mutually assured destruction, yet in 1961 Mad magazine unveiled “Spy vs Spy,” a cartoon spoofing Cold War espionage. That was also the joke of several 1960s comedies, including “Get Smart,” and the Boris and Natasha characters in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.
On the spy show “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” which ran from 1964 to 1968, a Soviet agent, Illya Kuryakin, teamed up with an American agent, Napoleon Solo, to fight a common enemy power, known as THRUSH.
That may have been wishful screenwriting, but it’s certainly not fashionable anymore. When “Covert Affairs” began in 2010, the heroine, a C.I.A. rookie, is recruited for her first big assignment because she is needed to help the agency reel in a high-level defector.
Mostly, what’s changed in the portrayal of post-Communist Russia is not the tone but the intensity. Russians used to be relegated to secondary roles, organized crime figures, oligarchs and the like. Now, on shows like “The Americans” and the coming “Allegiance,” Russian spies and their masters are the protagonists.
Russia hasn’t really changed, our awareness of it has: Thanks largely to Mr. Putin, nowadays it looms so large that it fills the small screen.