Why Mr. & Mrs. Smith Is the Best Thing Streaming Right Now

Amazon Mr. and Mrs. Smith, reimagined by Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane, takes the title of the 2005 film and builds something entirely different: an espionage series that is really a relationship drama.

The show almost had a different lead. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was attached to co-create and co-star opposite Glover and left in 2021, before filming, over creative differences. Maya Erskine replaced her, and the result is a different and better show. Waller-Bridge would have brought verbal firepower. What the part actually needs is someone who can be silently unimpressed, which Erskine had already proved she could do in PEN15, the series she co-created and in which she plays herself at thirteen.

Donald Glover and Maya Erskine have extraordinary chemistry, and the show leans on it completely. Their dynamic feels genuinely improvised at times, with the awkwardness, humor, and escalating affection of a real relationship.

Each episode is self-contained enough to vary wildly in tone. One episode is a thriller. Another is a comedy of errors. Another is essentially a two-person chamber piece about trust.

The episodes are titled after relationship stages rather than missions, running from a first date through a shared holiday to couples therapy, and that is the whole design. Eight episodes, most running between 45 and 55 minutes, with the numbering on screen doubling as a relationship counter. The spy plot is the delivery mechanism. Each hour advances the marriage first and the job second.

The guest stars are deployed brilliantly. Paul Dano, Alexander Skarsgard, and Michaela Coel appear in individual episodes that illuminate different aspects of the central relationship.

Sarah Paulson gets a single scene as a couples therapist and it is the best sequence in the series, an unbroken session in which two spies each try to win an argument neither can win. John Turturro and Ron Perlman also appear. The guest slots work because none of them recur: each is a stress test applied to the marriage and then removed.

The production design makes the most of its New York City setting. The couple brownstone becomes a character in itself.

The house is issued to them by the agency along with the identities, furnished to look aspirational rather than lived in, which is the joke. Watch what accumulates on the surfaces across the eight episodes. The clutter is doing the same work as the dialogue.

Where it wobbles is the action. The gunfights are competent and forgettable, and the show knows it, which is why the strongest episode is two people in a therapist office. If you want the Glover version of this restlessness at full strength, Atlanta season three is the reference point. Francesca Sloane wrote on that show before running this one.

Stream on Prime Video at https://www.primevideo.com/detail/mr-and-mrs-smith.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith is essential because it uses the spy genre as a lens to examine something universal: what it takes to really know another person. The action is fun, the performances are captivating, and the emotional payoff is earned.