Prime Video’s Update of Mr. and Mrs. Smith Crackles with Wit and Creative Energy

It’s hard to believe but the nostalgia machine that repurposes everything that was a hit before has reached the 2000s, getting to Doug Liman’s 2005 blockbuster “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the film that notoriously united Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt forever in pop culture history. While the new Amazon Prime Video series loosely based on that film has a very different structure and tone, its greatest strength is strikingly similar. Roger wrote of the 2005 hit, “There is a kind of movie that consists of watching two people together on the screen. The plot is immaterial. What matters is the "chemistry," a term that once referred to a science but now refers to the heat we sense, or think we sense, between two movie stars.” What really works about the new “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is in the interplay between stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine. They may not have the blinding star wattage of Brangelina, but there’s something comforting about their witty, sexy, creative chemistry as they come to life in this clever show co-created by Glover and Francesca Sloane. It may not be as landmark a series as “Atlanta” or as twisted as “Pen15” (Erskine’s previous project), but it’s a remarkably easy watch, a fun piece of comfort food programming that alternates unpredictable mystery-of-the-week plotting with increasingly likable characters.

Sloane & Glover’s version of this tale sets a different table from the very beginning. Whereas Simon Kinberg’s script was a variation on the now-common theme of domestic bliss torn apart by espionage—see recent duds like “Family Plan” and “Role Play,” or rather don’t—this take starts with two spies who know exactly what they’re getting into with one another. Well, actually it opens with a couple who appears to be a Mr. and Mrs. Smith of their own, played by Alexander Skarsgard and Eiza Gonzalez. Before you can say, “They’re in this?,” they’re brutally assassinated, implying that when a couple of Smiths are burned, they must be eliminated, setting stakes for what’s to come when the next pair fails their missions.

The world of spydom needs a new Mr. and Mrs. Smith, introducing us to a charming pair going through an interview process with an unseen hiring agent. The next Jane Smith (Erskine) is obviously brilliant, the kind of spy who can adjust to any situation and is willing to leave most of her life (not her cat) behind to start a new one deep undercover with an unknown partner. Her eventual John Smith (Glover) feels a bit more battle-weary, dropping the number of people he has killed in the field in his interview, although keeping that actual digit a secret from Jane like a new partner would their body count.

At first, John & Jane try to keep it professional, refusing to become a couple in bed as well as the field, but that doesn’t last long at all. It turns out that putting your life in jeopardy as a fake couple makes Mr. and Mrs. Smith a real one quickly, and the writers cleverly play with parallels between espionage and romantic partnership in every subsequent episode. As John and Jane start to care for one another, they also start to reveal more about their pasts, mirroring how we open up to new partners in real life, but against a life-and-death backdrop.