Halfway through the second episode of Prime Video’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, when Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are crawling around on all fours in evening wear, trading panicked looks while waiting to stick their target with a vial of truth serum, it becomes abundantly clear that this is a different kind of spy show. The series, co-created by Glover and Francesca Sloane and based on the 2005 Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie vehicle of the same name, is a spy story that sends up spy stories, a relationship comedy pretending to be a secret agent drama pretending to be a critique of office culture. It’s not like anything you’re expecting – it’s better.
“John” (Glover) and “Jane” (Erskine) are volunteers for a shadowy organization that pairs its agents together as “married” couples as cover for all of their future assignments. Their new identities are outfitted with the kind of opulent city living urban thirtysomethings dream about – a tastefully decorated townhouse, a Range Rover, wardrobes full of plain yet expensive clothes – as well as plenty of forged identification documents and a computer chat program they use to communicate with their handlers. Every episode brings a new assignment – a mysterious delivery, a surveillance op, a pretend kidnapping – the purposes for which are unknown to both the characters and the viewers.
It sounds like the makings of a typical action series, but Mr. and Mrs. Smith takes a different approach. Fans of the movie will remember that the Smiths’ relationship is its true driving force – the “spy stuff” is often secondary to the interplay between John and Jane. Glover and Sloane tone down the Charlie’s Angels-meets-James Bond riff, offering more room to play around with other angles of their premise. It’s sort of realistic that way: Real-world spies, more often than not, aren’t running around in all-black tactical gear with weapons strapped to their limbs. They look and act like everyone else, bugging our phones and covertly poisoning strangers as soon as they look the other way.
It makes for a loose adaptation of the cinematic source material, though screenwriter Simon Kinberg still receives an “inspired by” credit. In the movie, John and Jane have no idea they’re working for rival agencies, and their ignorance is used against them. In the show, John and Jane are more like coworkers navigating a new job where their only lifelines are each other, despite the fact that they’re basically strangers. By design, their real identities are top secret, but in order to work together, they kind of have to reveal themselves piecemeal – or at least make up something that sounds like it might be the truth. They’re deep-cover operatives cut off from the friends and family they might have had in their old lives, meaning Jane’s only meaningful onscreen interactions are with John, and vice versa. Ironically, or maybe inevitably, this forced distance draws them together.
A sly satire of the gig industry makes itself known over the course of the first season. Though John and Jane work for “the company,” their jobs are short assignments they receive day-of, like a secret agent Fiverr, giving the episodes a refreshing, throwback case-of-the-week feel (and allowing actors like Sarah Paulson, John Turturro, and Parker Posey to drop in for hilarious guest-star roles). The parameters of the missions are communicated through a computer chat in that unmistakable fake chummy cadence of corporate Slack speak, their handlers pinging them with a light “Hihi” (also the Smiths’ codename for whoever hired them) and signing off with “Thanks.”
Early on, John and Jane treat their job like a temporary arrangement: “Let’s make a certain amount of money that we both feel good about, and then we can part our ways, live our own lives,” Jane says. But the perks of their new life are too good to give up, and it soon becomes clear that getting out won’t be as easy as they’d thought. At times, Mr. and Mrs. Smith feels like the type of hazy, Kafkaesque maze that co-creator Glover and director Hiro Murai constructed so well during their Atlanta days, complete with moody, elegant cinematography and an alternately anxious-and-dreamy ambient score from David Fleming.
It also can’t be ignored that Mr. and Mrs. Smith is extremely hot. Though Erskine and Glover are purposefully a different kind of sexy than the statuesque glam of Jolie and Pitt, they remain mesmerizing, playing their characters as mysterious yet desperate for connection, falling deeper into whatever this “relationship” is while always keeping an eye on the exit. They do things that couples do: getting into a fight at a ski resort, trading jabs in a therapist’s office, criticizing other couples behind their backs as a reminder of their superiority. It’s honestly very romantic, made even more so by the fantastical secret agent element that makes it harder for John and Jane to peel back each other’s layers. Who are these people? Who are they to each other? How long can you fake something before it becomes real? Mr. and Mrs. Smith lurks in the space between answers, an enigma not even a secret agent could shake.
