Remakes and reboots are among those phenomena that most accurately define the contemporary audiovisual industry. From 60s West Side Story to the more recent Harry Potter franchise, which is going to be the subject of an upcoming serial production, movies and TV shows from the past decades are a constant source of inspiration for new outputs adapting the plot for today’s audience. The outcome of such operations is variable, often depending on how much the new version can innovate compared to the original. This also applies to Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the 2024 TV show by Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane – mostly renowned for their roles in Atlanta.

Available on Prime Video, the series reinterprets in a serial format the homonymous 2005 movie, featuring Brad Pitt and Angelia Jolie as a husband-wife duo competing in the espionage industry – fun fact, the two actors fell in love for real right during filming. Actually, the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith has little to do with its antecedent. Playing on the archetypes of spy movies, the show fully focuses on John (Donald Glover, also creator) Jane (Maya Erskine), at first posing as spouses to hide their real occupation and eventually falling for each other. Based on an anthological framework, each of the eight episodes follows the two protagonists in a new perilous mission and, concurrently, in the evolution of their love relationship, which closely concerns the experience of most millennial couples.

Along with works like Fallout and House of the Dragon, the show received 16 nominations at the Emmy Awards 2024, winning two of them – Outstanding Guest Actress In A Drama Series to Michaela Coel and Outstanding Stunt Coordination For Drama Programming to Stephen Pope.

Guns and Roses

In a fictional version of contemporaneity, a nameless company hires strangers in couples as spies. Once matched, they drop their true identity to become John and Jane Smith, two seemingly harmless spouses actually committed to high-risk assignments. Like the other Smiths, the two protagonists (Maya Erskine and Donald Glover) didn’t know each other before moving into the deluxe New York apartment provided by the dodgy organization as the operational base for their task. Indeed, their relationship begins as a cold, pragmatic, and clumsy collaboration between colleagues, under the disguise of a wedding.

With a succession of deadly missions between the Italian Dolomites and Lake Como, a deeper complicity between John and Jane gradually emerges, ending with the two falling in love. The affair though inevitably clashes with the ruthless pace and strong emotional charge of their job, which amplifies the problems in their relationship. Jane is mainly interested in career advancement, getting increasingly overbearing and commanding, while John struggles to leave sentiment outside work, suffering from Jane’s ruthlessness. As tensions escalate, the couple comes to understand each other more and more deeply but also starts acknowledging that the job they signed up for is not so easy to resign from.

Reimagining spy movies

The spy figure in the creative media rests inevitably on James Bond, the character created by English novelist Ian Fleming in the 50s and later the main star of a popular movie franchise. For nearly 40 years its characteristics remained pretty stable in collective imagery: a lone wolf, whose past is unknown, highly skilled, ruthless, and occasionally involved in one-night stands.

At the turn of the 2000s, though, such a model entered an irreversible crisis, suddenly outdated and incapable of keeping up with a fast-changing society. Then two roads opened up. On the one side, the movie series came back from its ashes, with new themes, tropes, and narrative codes. Thanks to Daniel Craig‘s performance, 007 became a credible and well-rounded character, more human than ever before and even subject to the sorrows of love. On the other side, he inspired several parodic works, such as Johnny English (2003), starring Rowan Atkinson as a clumsy and unlikely secret agent.

This strand includes 2005 Mr. & Mrs. Smith, where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie played a married couple having a double life without each other’s knowledge. Despite the typical pace of an action flick, the movie best fits the romantic comedy genre, as its core is the whole “Brangelina” dynamic. Sloane and Glover’s TV show takes this a step further: the running plot of the 8 episodes is not the espionage part, but rather the evolution of the two protagonists’ love affair. Overall, John and Jane’s spying missions serve as a mere narrative device to explore the relationship between the characters, from the early stages to maturity, passing through difficulties and misunderstandings.

Being lovers in the 2020s

Besides their life-threatening job and fictitious identities, John and Jane make the quintessential mid-30s couple. And not only for the visual and aesthetics the whole show conveys – as Alison Herman notes about the New York apartment they live in, “from the built-in arches to the houseplants, the vibe is ‘millennial Pinterest board'”. Throughout eight episodes, the protagonists are put in front of most of the typical challenges and obstacles that two young spouses may encounter in today’s world. They both struggle to find their place in society: once rejected by C.I.A., they find themselves applying for a highly paid position in a mysterious private agency. Lavish salary though has a cost: they have to abandon their previous life, devoting their whole selves to the missions the Company assigns them via a digital chatbot.

Jane, coming from a problematic family background, finds herself at ease in her new life: advancing in the seemingly fluid hierarchies of the agency becomes a way to keep her mind clear of her past. Conversely, John is reckless in foregoing some aspects of his previous routine: he secretly keeps calling his mum, plans to purchase a holiday home, and engages in relationships that could jeopardize the couple’s front. Eventually, work conflicts will lead to a crisis that feels plausible to a contemporary audience. “The new John and Jane Smith”, writes Inkoo Kang, “embody their generation’s emotional and economic malaise”, terrified of job instability and yet incapable of finding a work-life balance. In a hilarious scene, they even take the deal in front of a therapist, trying to circumvent the fact that their occupation involves guns.

Leveraging its comic side, Mr. & Mrs. Smith manages to expose the contradictions of the modern labor scenario, which, while lacking in gunfights and chases, can hide pitfalls to be aware of.