David Lee/Amazon
For those of us old enough to remember the dawn of this wretched century, the title Mr. and Mrs. Smith probably triggers the idea of wildly intense costar chemistry. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s 2005 film of the same name famously ignited a firestorm of cultural obsession and gave the world “Brangelina,” after the two leads became an item around the time that the movie was shot. The film’s existence became inseparable from the Hollywood couple that it spawned, so much so that a remake seemed inconceivable. Good luck to the pair of actors who would take up the titular roles; recreating a spark so electric that millions of people believed your predecessors fell in love on set is like trying to bottle lightning a second time—it was already a miracle that it happened once.
Unless, as it turns out, you’re Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, who star in Prime Video’s version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, streaming Feb. 2. The series—which is based on the 2005 film but is far closer to the short-lived 1996 TV show—finds the two actors playing house together in a luxurious apartment in New York. John (Glover) and Jane (Erskine) Smith might look like your average thirty-something Silicon Valley transplants, funneling their tech money into an outrageously expensive metropolitan lifestyle. But they’re simply playing to their cover: This newly married couple have never even met before when they wind up inside the same townhouse one afternoon, sent there after being contracted for high-risk espionage by a mysterious company.
But you wouldn’t know that by watching them. Erskine and Glover have some of the most blissfully natural chemistry seen on screen, in any capacity, in a hot second. And that’s the idea: John and Jane have to fool their neighbors and everyone that they come into contact with. But the show’s pair of leads make that task look effortless and completely graceful. Glover and Erskine’s alluring rapport is the reason to come to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but it’s also the show’s adhesive. Whenever the drawn-out, episodic missions threaten to drag, the actors snap the series right back into place, keeping this iteration of the Smiths a delightful, darkly funny couple to fall head over heels for.