TV Talk: Millennial ennui meets ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

The 2005 film “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” worked well as both a high-concept thriller and as a coming out for the romantic relationship between stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who played married assassins hired to kill one another.

Amazon Prime Video’s iteration of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, opts for a new story, at least at its start: John (Glover) and Jane (Erskine) are hired via computer to pose as husband and wife and conduct missions together.

It’s smart to initially ditch the spy vs. spy concept — how long could you really sustain them trying to kill each other in an ongoing series? — but what it’s replaced by proves less exciting than the Pitt-Jolie movie. (My bet: Jane and John will get assigned to kill each other at some point.)

This new take, written by Glover and Francesca Sloane (“Atlanta”), features many uncomfortable, quiet scenes punctuated by an occasional action sequence that gets the pulse racing. There’s a lot of millennial angst to sit through to get to the more exciting scenes.

Now streaming all eight episodes on Prime Video, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” is certainly clever as it juxtaposes the budding, bickering relationship between Jane and John against an argumentative couple (Billy Campbell, Sharon Horgan) they’re tasked to spy on in episode three.

As spies, Jane and John are supposed to cut off all contact with their families. John assumes Jane keeps in touch with her dad.

“You don’t know anything about my dad,” Jane says. “What if he molested me?”

Eventually, Jane says her dad did not molest her; John’s appalled that she would use such a hypothetical.

She’s overly guarded and paranoid; he’s needy.

Much of the series is Jane and John making bad assumptions about each other, talking past one another in awkward, unbearable moments and negotiating their relationship through a series of little spats that snowball into massive mistrust.

Like the overrated, over-awarded “Beef,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” is a slow-burn series that’s smart and attentive to its characters’ psychological details, but it’s only fun in drips and drabs.