Mr. and Mrs. Smith stars Glover and Maya Erskine as the titular characters -- two strangers paired up as spies and dispatched around the world by an unknown handler. Navigating their cover as a married couple proves just as difficult as any of their dangerous missions. Over the course of eight episodes, the "Smiths" learn to love each other... and then sour on each other to an increasingly savage degree.
When this project was first announced years ago, it was a team-up of Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of Fleabag fame. That was an exciting prospect to me: two writer-creator-actors, each with a well-regarded show, pooling their talents in a spy thriller? Count me in! Except that within a few months, Waller-Bridge left the project due to the oft-cited "creative differences." My own enthusiasm faded, and here it's taken me a year since Mr. and Mrs. Smith released to actually finish watching the show we ultimately got.
What we got is still a pretty good show. It's not hard to imagine what the "creative differences" might have been, as this is a fairly dark and definitely gritty drama with very few comedic accents. Spy thrillers are pretty much unrealistic by definition, but to the degree one can suspend their disbelief, this show plays to be as realistic as the format allows.
While each episode has all the action you could ask for -- foot races, car chases, reversals and improvisations, explosions -- it is fundamentally a relationship drama. When you take the whole season in totality, you see it's a particular kind of relationship drama, focused on what draws two people together. Does having one or two things strongly in common make for enough "glue" to bind a couple together when they're incompatible in basically every other way? It's a slightly deeper take on the classic "opposites attract" rom-com, made all the more different for the spy genre it's grafted onto.
It might sound like the relationship elements overwhelm the action, but they really don't. Indeed, I could have done with more -- or, at least, a longer runway to deal with them. In my eyes, the eight episodes really wasn't enough to track the arc of Mr. and Mrs. Smith's relationship. Their emotional turns felt awfully abrupt to me in key moments, necessitated because the series only had a limited amount of time to get to where it was going.
But then, this is a TV show, so the end of a season isn't necessarily the end of the show, right? Well, in the sense that it was renewed for a second season, right -- we are getting more episodes at some point. But the arc of Glover and Erskine's characters feels complete to me by the end of season one. Picking up with them again feels to me like it would be struggling to squeeze more juice from a spent fruit. And throughout the season, it's made clear that there are other "Mr. and Mrs. Smiths" in the world of this show; so a season two might just as easily reveal that we're watching an anthology of spy thriller mini-series.
I think I'd be there for that. But on the other hand, a big part of the appeal of season one was the two stars. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are good separately in their roles, and have good on-screen chemistry in the story. Still, just as important in what made the show fun was the deep bench of guest stars who popped up throughout the season, including Paul Dano, Parker Posey, John Turturro, Sarah Paulson, Billy Campbell, Alexander Skarsgård, Ron Perlman, and more. This series had the acting roster of a long-running prestige show that gets actors in who just want to be part of something widely regarded to be great... even though not one minute of this had been seen publicly when they all showed up on set. If Mr. and Mrs. Smith can keep that going even if it decides to rotate the stars each season? I think that would still be fun.
I give Mr. and Mrs. Smith a B+. I probably shouldn't have waited so long to watch it... though with television production times so spread out these days, I'm still finished well ahead of the next crop of episodes, whenever they'll come. If you haven't watched it yet, you've got plenty of time too.
