Mr & Mrs Smith: The Show That Figured Out Television

The best decision Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane made about their new Mr & Mrs Smith show, which dropped on Amazon Prime in February and has been slowly acquiring word-of-mouth across March, was to decide that the 2005 Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie film was a title they were borrowing, not a property they were adapting.

This is not a spy thriller. This is a relationship drama shot inside a spy-thriller premise.

The structural move

John and Jane Smith (Glover and Maya Erskine) are not married, not initially; they are recruited into a spy agency and assigned to live together as a married couple while executing missions. Each of the eight episodes corresponds to a separate mission, with the relationship between the two characters developing across the episode gaps as a parallel plot. The missions are, deliberately, not the focus. The focus is the marriage (or the simulation of a marriage, or the approximation of a marriage) that develops between the two strangers over the course of what, in real-world time, is maybe a year of their life.

The specific thing that makes this work is that Glover and Sloane are not interested in will-they-or-won’t-they. They skip the flirtation phase, which most romance-adjacent TV dramas milk for seasons. John and Jane are sleeping together by episode two. The drama is not the seduction. The drama is what happens once the seduction is complete and they actually have to live with each other while continuing to be sent on increasingly dangerous missions by an agency that monitors them through their smart appliances.

What Erskine is doing

Maya Erskine, previously best known for the Hulu sitcom PEN15, is doing the most interesting work in the show. Her Jane is a specific kind of person I do not think we have seen before in American spy fiction: a deeply competent young woman who is also, as the show’s episodes accumulate, revealed to be an unreliable reporter of her own emotional life. She will tell John that she is fine. She will tell herself that she is fine. The camera, patiently, will watch her be not fine.

Erskine’s specific comic-dramatic register is the show’s breakout achievement. She can play a line as comedy and as pain simultaneously, and the show’s scripts know this and write to it. The scene in episode six, in a therapist’s office, where Jane and John are undergoing couples counselling under professional cover, is the best single piece of TV comedy I have seen this year. It is also, on second viewing, one of the saddest.

Where Glover is at

Donald Glover, as John, is doing slightly less acrobatic work than Erskine, but he is doing it well. His John is deliberately lower-key, an ordinary-seeming man who is, in the show’s framing, “the more vulnerable one.” The move is both narratively interesting, in that it upends the genre’s traditional gender assignment of emotional risk, and specifically suited to Glover’s strengths, which have always been observational rather than driving.

The show leans on Glover as the point of access for the viewer. We see Jane through his eyes as often as we see him through hers. Glover’s John is the show’s audience surrogate, surprised by Jane in the ways the show wants the audience to be surprised by her.

The guest-star architecture

One of the show’s most-discussed choices is its willingness to deploy major guest stars, Michaela Coel, John Turturro, Sarah Paulson, Parker Posey, Paul Dano, Ron Perlman, in limited appearances across the season. Some viewers found this distracting. I found it invigorating.

What the guest-star architecture does is keep each mission’s stakes local and specific. A single-episode guest can introduce a richly-drawn supporting character without the showrunners having to commit to carrying that character across the season. It also allows the show to stage the missions as mini-movies, each with its own tonal register, rather than as installments in a continuous serialised plot.

The John Turturro episode, in which the Smiths are sent to investigate a fugitive tech executive, is the season’s single best episode and a reminder that Turturro, given material, remains one of the most watchable actors in American television.

The Amazon question

Mr & Mrs Smith exists, as of this writing, inside a specific institutional moment at Amazon Prime, where the streaming service is simultaneously producing some of the most interesting adult drama on television (Fleishman is in Trouble, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Dead Ringers, now Mr & Mrs Smith) and also some of the most expensive, aesthetically-bankrupt tentpole product in the history of streaming (The Rings of Power, various other franchise extensions).

Where Amazon puts its marketing weight matters. Mr & Mrs Smith has not had the Rings-of-Power budget for marketing, and the show is finding its audience the hard way, week by week, through viewer-to-viewer recommendation. This is actually healthy for the show, I think. Prestige drama found through friends tends to land deeper than prestige drama assigned by algorithm.

Where the season lands

The season finale, which I will not spoil, does something formally audacious with its final sequence. A lot of viewers found the choice divisive. I was in the camp that found it earned. The show has been, throughout, interested in the specific way professional cover disrupts domestic intimacy, and the finale gives us the structural endpoint of that interest without softening the implications.

Whether the show returns for a second season is, as of this writing, unclear. The creative team has said that they would not do another season unless a specific new creative direction were identified. I trust them on this. If the show ends at one season, it ends having done something very specific and complete. If it returns, I will turn up.

Watch it across two nights, not eight. The rhythm is worth preserving. Give Erskine room to land.