Streaming on: Prime Video
Episodes viewed: 8 of 8
Co-creators Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s take on Mr. & Mrs. Smith flips the 2005 Doug Liman movie on its head. That sexy, frothy blockbuster followed a married couple who discover they’re both secretly working as assassins and their whole relationship has been based on lies. Here, the core couple are still undercover agents, but they enter into marriage knowing that, and pretty much only that, about each other.
Two strangers (Donald Glover and Maya Erskine) sign up to a shadowy spy agency, agreeing to abandon their past lives and begin a new one as a married couple. Renamed John and Jane Smith, their apparently regular marriage will be a cover for their missions for the agency, which involve kidnap, theft, and sometimes bloody murder. That bit they’re fine with. It’s the adjustment to forced intimacy that unsettles them. This is less about being a secret spy than about figuring out how to make a relationship work when your life depends on it. Imagine Married At First Sight with significantly higher stakes.
Glover and Erskine both play it beautifully, romcom charisma shot through with something verging on sinister.
It’s a really interesting take on the movie and one that makes sense coming from Glover, whose breakout project Atlanta (on which Sloane was also a writer) was ostensibly about a rising rapper and his manager, but often more about the level of performance required to be Black in America. He doesn’t make shows that can be summed up neatly. And this is not a neat show. In fact, it’s often quite peculiar.
Anyone expecting the gun-and-run fun of the film will have to wait. Mr. & Mrs. Smith grows into a spy show as John and Jane ease into their work roles — by Episode 5 they’re mowing down bad guys in Lake Como — but early on it’s very talky, as these two try to figure out who they are to each other. As the spy stuff increases, so does the marital angst — two professional liars do not an easy union make.
It’s an odd tone to get used to. Even with an apparently enormous budget — production values are plush and the guest roles high-wattage — it’s all rather downplayed; expensive-looking set-pieces tossed aside while intimate dialogue scenes linger. But as you slip into its groove and its well-observed but not ‘jokey’ humour, its unpredictable weirdness becomes its charm. Glover and Erskine both play it beautifully, romcom charisma shot through with something verging on sinister. As much as you like them, it’s hard to trust them. And it’s that mix of mystery and madness that makes these Smiths so strangely seductive.