This review was originally published on February 2, 2024. Mr. & Mrs. Smith has since received 16 nominations for the 2024 Emmy Awards. Read all of Vulture’s Emmy-race coverage here.
In the 2005 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith, two married spies discover they’ve been assigned to kill each other. Espionage and all the accompanying machinery sit on the surface — this is a movie about upper-middle-class marriage. The fight scenes are sex metaphors and then, pretty swiftly, just sex. The Smiths have been living with an emotional alienation spurred on by the stultifying regularity of corporate jobs, a house in the suburbs, and the need to keep up appearances. They rediscover each other; they literally obliterate the aspirational McMansion trapping them in conformity.
Amazon Prime’s new remake series, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, also uses espionage as a big, occasionally violent playground in which to explore ideas about modern-day marriage. But in 2024, the landscape for two hot up-and-coming go-getter spies looks a little different. Here, emotional connection and living authentically are luxuries the Smiths don’t even think to want. The weight of responsibility is no longer about maintaining your soul while deadened by the granite-countertop heft of 2005’s suburban expectations. It’s that your dream life is so otherwise financially unattainable that you can’t have it without taking a job with a truly terrible work-life balance.
John and Jane have failed at earlier attempts at careers and relationships, and they’ve accepted a position at a mysterious, unnamed company that interacts with them through the distinctly 2024 method of corporate communications written as casual, friendly text messages. (They call their employer “hihi†after the way they’re greeted via text.) But there are no big clues that simmer quietly in the background, and there’s almost no urgency in trying to track down What’s Really Going On. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is not designed with the propulsive, ever-heightening momentum of an action movie. It’s episodic, with each of its eight installments (all of which premiered today) tackling a new mission — spying on a woman in the Italian Alps, administering a truth serum to a wealthy buyer at an auction — while also being framed around a relationship milestone, from first date through couples therapy. The connections from one episode to the next are about John and Jane’s relationship: Who’s mad at the other one? What emotional vulnerability have they finally revealed? Their assignment is to pretend they’re married, but at some point play-acting turns into real feelings. Whether they can manage to be honest with one another is an open question.
The Smiths don’t long for an explosive climax the way their film predecessors did, or at least they don’t think they do. What they want is regularity, security, and comfort. What communicates that better than the repeating rhythm of a new story each episode, one that doesn’t have to feel beholden to whatever came before? The slower pace lets the show dawdle on other themes: a running subcurrent about race, as John and Jane approach missions that require them to blend into different kinds of settings; a recurring interest in how they think about parenting, both in terms of their own childhoods and their imagined future. They are, after all, millennials with careers that keep them very busy. They do wonder about the wisdom of sacrificing their high-risk, high-reward lives for the sake of having a baby.
The attention to marriage over developing a spycraft plot makes the series feel like it’s wandering a bit, not fully keyed into its own stakes. But it’s also such a relief to watch a TV series that doesn’t strive for film-style plotting stretched over eight hours. There is some bumpiness in pacing and plotting, but Mr. & Mrs. Smith has a finely tuned sense of the world John and Jane are striving for. The aspirational lifestyle is no longer a four-bed, three-bath in the suburbs. It’s a brownstone in New York stuffed to the rafters with absurd but tastefully selected amenities like a basement-level pool, rooftop garden, and home theater. It’s an Architectural Digest home tour turned spy show, and ridiculous wealth signifiers are littered across the frame (What is that wild beverage thing in their kitchen? Look at all the finicky succulents on that plant stand in the bedroom!) and studded throughout the dialogue (John and Jane, adjusting to their new digs, have a whole conversation about the luxury mattress stuffed with horsehair).
Mr. & Mrs. Smith gets its surfaces right. Glover and Erskine absolutely look the part and have effective enough chemistry that they pull off each new stage of John and Jane’s relationship. The series uses its guest stars in exactly the same way it decorates its sets, with high-class taste and humor and full awareness that the role of the guest star has a classic episodic function, to show up and be a new obstacle for its leads. But it’s also to make a viewer say “Oh, wow, that person!†(In this case, that person includes Alexander Skarsgard, Sharon Horgan, Parker Posey, Michaela Coel, and Sarah Paulson.) Maybe even more important than anyone onscreen, Hiro Murai’s direction of the first two episodes gives the show a paradoxical balance of Instagram-grid perfection coupled with frantic instability.
Whether it nails all the stuff underneath is a trickier question. There’s a clarity to the original and its metaphors about spying and marriage — you almost expect Pitt to turn to the audience and say “Get it?!†as he and Jolie pepper their beautiful kitchen with bullets. The new Mr. & Mrs. Smith is messier, and it’s trying to get its arms around a bigger set of concerns. There’s wealth and happiness in here, but there’s also race and parenting and goodness and honesty and loyalty and a lot of other ideas. They’re intriguing, but they can also feel like John and Jane’s house: a display of taste more than a genuine reflection of interest. But that feels in keeping with what this Mr. & Mrs. Smith aims for — it’s about the look and the rhythm, and about whether its two leads can figure out what they want the most. Is it the brownstone? Or is it the pleasure of blowing it all up?