The 2005 action-comedy blockbuster “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as an uncommonly good-looking suburban couple whose lifeless marriage was reinvigorated when both partners turned out to be assassins secretly working for rival organizations. Lots of fighting and sexiness ensued.
That film has the historical distinction of imposing the concept of “Brangelina” onto the nation’s consciousness, for which I’m sure we’re all grateful. So, understandably, not many people realized (or cared) that “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” was actually a remake of a TV drama that aired a handful of episodes on CBS in 1996 before being unceremoniously canceled.
The movie had reversed the premise of the original series, which starred Scott Bakula and Maria Bello in the title roles as spies who did not know each other but had to pose as a married couple, which, while perfectly decent-looking, smoldered at nowhere near Brangelina levels of intensity.
When rebooting the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” franchise for Amazon Prime Video, the TV auteur Donald Glover opted to revisit the lesser-known version of this premise. He and Maya Erskine star as strangers, codenamed John and Jane Smith, who are recruited by a mysterious organization for covert spy work and assigned to live and work together as make-believe spouses.
Situated in a luxury New York apartment with barely any time to get to know each other, the “Smiths” are given missions of escalating danger: delivering explosives, abducting art collectors, rescuing kidnapped billionaires, protecting human assets from assassination. Perhaps eventually they will need to target each other.
As they trot around the world from assignment to assignment, unsurprisingly, they develop romantic chemistry. Reverting to the original show’s premise allows Glover and series co-creator Francesca Sloane to explore the mechanics of a reverse-engineered relationship: they start off married then get to decide whether they love each other.
Each of the series’ eight episodes presents some microcosmic challenge that represents a real hurdle in a marriage. Do we want kids? Do we go to couples’ therapy? Do we buy property together? Do we stay faithful?
This alone makes the new “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” a more substantive project than the famous, frivolous movie. But it’s not the most interesting thing happening; the show is also low-key one of the darkest workplace comedies I’ve ever seen.
Granted, it’s not set in an office. John and Jane’s workplace is basically anywhere they’re summoned. Their job is an extreme, and in some ways appealing, version of digitally nomadic gig work, finding them jet-setting around the world and performing isolated hyper-specific (if often violent) tasks in exchange for significant material rewards.
They receive instructions via an online chat presence known to them only as “Hihi.” They know nothing about the company they work for or what larger purpose, if any, their missions serve. They are free to find purpose in the work, or not. They can step over each other to advance if they so choose.
Before long it becomes clear why their aliases are so comically generic. They cross paths with another couple of “Smiths” who work for the same company — played by Wagner Moura and Parker Posey — and discover precisely how replaceable they are.
Our John and Jane remain safe, secure and well-compensated as long as they are discrete, competent and compliant. But the minute their usefulness is in doubt, they experience the company’s unconventional HR process, which involves a lot of automatic gunfire.
The Smiths’ professional journey literalizes millennial economic dread in timely ways, raising but not answering questions we should all be asking. Is a job ever anything besides transactional? Is it possible to derive meaning from work while knowing you’re merely an expendable cog? Is “meaning” something we should expect work to provide?
Dangerous or not, the Smiths’ career choices will make sense to people who came of age during the Great Recession and understand that many of the work-life assumptions normalized in the 20th century — upward mobility, reciprocal company loyalty, middle-class stability, a comfortable retirement — have been illusions for longer than they were ever real.