After Atlanta ended, did anyone expect that Donald Glover’s follow-up to that groundbreaking series would be a complete remake of a Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie action comedy? But this new take on Mr. & Mrs. Smith is likely to make you forget all about the 2005 film, and in a very good way.
Opening Shot: A soft wind makes some wind chimes on a porch make some music. A woman (Eiza González) and a man (Alexander Skarsgård), hiding out from whoever they’re hiding out from, decide to stay and fight when a car speeds towards their house. Of course, neither of them make it.
The Gist: We see a man and a woman walk into a room and face a large screen. They’re asked for their fingernail clippings, and then the screen types out questions for them to answer, like questions about their history in the military and law enforcement. As we see Jane Smith (Maya Erskine) and John Smith (Donald Glover) enter and walk around their new, luxurious New York townhome, we hear Jane say that she didn’t make it to the CIA because of “antisocial tendencies” and John say that the fact that his military discharge was dishonorable was a matter of opinion.
Of course, Jane and John Smith are their new names, and, despite being a legally married couple, they meet each other for the first time when they enter that townhouse. They get all of their identification — including a marriage license — and meet a cat that John assumes comes with the house. They sleep in separate rooms the first night, with John taking picture of a plant Jane has and claiming he has an app that can tell if it needs watering. What he really is doing is getting a pic of her to see if Google’s facial recognition finds anything out about her. He finds out nothing, though.
Their first mission is to go to a cafe near Chinatown and follow a woman until she receives a package; they need to intercept the package and deliver it to the coordinates they’re given. .
As they stake the woman out and try to figure out just what the package was, John tries to sus out information about Jane, even mundane info about whether she’s been in New York before. She’s reluctant to say anything, but does reveal that she was there on a school trip but ditched it “to have pancakes with a pedophile.” Before she can explain, the woman is on the move.
While they continue to follow her, John continues to tease out information from Jane, who’s not giving much. But the story about the breakfast with the pedophile does connect them, and she’s willing to tell that story as she watches the woman watching a play. We also get more scenes from their final interview, where they’re both asked whether they’re willing to abandon their current lives.
They follow the woman through a Chinatown market where she receives the package, and John devises a way to get the package that feels subtle. After they deliver it, though, they get a hell of a surprise, and realize the first mission was a whole lot riskier than they thought it was.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Of course, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a new take on the 2005 film starring Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie. But this plot is completely different than the movie’s plot; here, John and Jane don’t know each other before working together, as opposed to the movie John and Jane being a married couple of assassins assigned by their respective bosses to kill each other. Created by Glover and Francesca Sloane, the low-key style is reminiscent of Glover’s previous series, Atlanta, on which Sloane was a producer.
Our Take: Glover’s go-to Atlanta director, Hiro Murai, directed the first episode of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and that sense of low-key calm interspersed with high tension carries over to this more action-oriented series. But that’s not the only aspect of Mr. & Mrs. Smith that makes the show so attractive.
What we’re seeing in this version is John and Jane building their relationship and trust in each other from nothing, and as they work through the missions in each episode, we’re going to see their feelings grow steadily. For some reason, seeing the relationship from its first moments, when they’re thrown together in such an artificial way, has the potential to be extremely satisfying.
It wouldn’t work if the chemistry between Glover and Erskine didn’t work. But even in the early moments of the Smiths’ pairing, we can see them click, mainly because Glover and Erskine are working on similar comedic wavelengths. Both are known for being dry, even brooding in their previous roles, and the fact that they play people who previous lives are so fraught and mysterious only adds to their wise and weary demeanors.
But what we also liked about this portrayal of Jane and Jon is that they’re not coming into this new job as a pair of superspies with no apparent flaws. They have flaws and foibles galore; Jane brought her cat with her to the house, it turns out, and likes to watch Naked And Afraid. John assumes that the handsome man their mark is meeting isn’t her boyfriend, and Jane calls him on it when he’s wrong.
It’s these little quirks, and the stories like the one Jane tells about meeting the pedo when she’s a teenager, that will bond the Smiths to each other despite the lingering feelings of mistrust due to the fact that, well, they have lived entire lives that they’re keeping quiet. But each case will bond them together, as well, as we see at the end of the first episode, when the unexpected turn the case makes shows how well they’ll need to work together in order to succeed and stay alive.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode, but who knows what we’ll see as the show goes along?
Parting Shot: After John leaves Jane in the main bedroom, she falls asleep as we flash back to that final interview in front of that screen. “Wow, so, just a whole new life,” Jane says. “Hmm. I’m OK with that.”
Sleeper Star: There will be a ton of interesting guest stars during the show’s first season, including Parker Posey, John Turturro, Dave Attell, Sharon Horgan, Michaela Coel, Ron Perlman and more. We’ve already seen what the Glover and Sloane are willing to do with guest stars with the very brief appearance of Skarsgård, so it’ll be interesting to see what they do with these other big names.
Most Pilot-y Line: The pedophile Jane and her friend met when they were teens called himself “Buddy Love”, like from Eddie Murphy’s version of The Nutty Professor. For some reason, the nickname should have been creepier.
Our Call: STREAM IT. This new take on Mr. & Mrs. Smith is funny and full of surprises, with great chemistry between Glover and Erskine that may lead to some interesting sexual tension as the series goes on.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.