The small-screen adaptation of Mr & Mrs Smith gets the ball rolling with an apparent homage to the first couples-counselling session in Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's film, in which an off-screen therapist lays bare the lack of sex in the Smith marriage.
The Prime Video show's first episode takes us into a nondescript espionage organisation which could pass for a local council office. Our leads, played by Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, are once again quizzed, but this time by a recruiting machine which greets them with a chipper "Hihi". The questions asked range from things like whether they're willing to relocate and how many people they've killed. Standard job-interview stuff.
This is how the spy world finds its new John and Jane Smith, two wayward strangers who cast away their old lives to embark on a new one not dissimilar to a Married at First Sight premise, all the while carrying out mystery-of-the-week style missions for their computer-based superior Mr Hihi.
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The 2005 Mr & Mrs Smith film was one which worked against all odds, given that if you really start to etch away at the plot, you could see how dangerously close it was to caving in on itself. What was the point of Adam Brody's character, really? Why did everyone at Jane's cult-y spy agency call their boss Father? Why did we catch a glimpse of so-called Father in one single scene for no apparent reason?
And why was Bogotá, a thriving capital city of eight million souls, depicted as a remote, humid village on the brink of societal collapse?
The glue holding the whole rickety structure together was the sheer voltage of chemistry between its leads, bolstered by the tabloid scandal bubbling in the film's ether. This was ground zero for the biggest celebrity love triangle that probably ever was.
That is not to say this Prime Video production hasn't come with its own dose of behind-the-scenes machinations. Fleabag multi-hyphenate Phoebe Waller-Bridge was initially signed on to co-star and co-create the show with Glover, but ultimately bowed out due to "creative differences". In the context of this intellectual property, it feels a bit like citing "irreconcilable differences" on a divorce filing.
While the mind may wander to what the show would have been like with the combined Waller-Bridge and Glover creative brainpower, Mr & Mrs Smith is first-rate enough to shake those musings off (although a dramatisation of whatever did unfold between the two showrunners could be a fascinating prospect).
Anyway, for those fearful this is another bland export of the remake culture, it is not that. While it borrows a jumping-off concept and two protagonist names from the original film, that's really where the similarities end.
In the film, Jolie and Pitt are pure examples of otherworldly beauty and charisma who make you question whether we, the viewer, are indeed the same species as them.
PEN15 star Erskine, meanwhile, has said she took comfort in Glover and showrunner Francesca Sloane's conceptualisation of the TV John and Jane Smith as "reject versions" of Jolie and Pitt.
This show is espionage by the normies. Glover and Erskine are still seductive and sumptuously beautiful, but are very real humans who fart and royally flub missions. If they did find a weapons-grade knife chest hidden in their stovetop, they would probably think the whole thing hilariously funny and end up lobbing blades badly at the wall.
That is where the TV show lucks out: upgrading the deadpan banter of the film to the properly funny beats we would expect from the combined efforts of Glover and Sloane, creator and producer of Atlanta, respectively.
The eight-parter is hugely entertaining and balanced. In an episode where there are international set-pieces for the action-minded, taking the production to the Italian Dolomites, there is also hilarious ski fashion-based commentary from Glover's John which is perfectly pitched for the Atlanta fans tuning in.
While Glover and Erskine are compelling enough as they suss one another out and embark on an ill-judged if inevitable romance, they're backed up by a fabulous roster of guest stars.
The big names – including Michaela Coel! Paul Dano! Sharon Horgan! – make themselves known from the off, with a fairly memorable, but admittedly old-hat, opening shootout scene from Alexander Skarsgård and Eiza González.
Since we mentioned the often intangible but vital spark of chemistry, there is that too. It isn't quite on the power-surge levels of Jolie and Pitt, but the material here outstrips the film's need to hang the whole thing on its leads.
The show does miss some of the ludicrous enemies-to-lovers fun of the film, where they're fighting one minute and fooling around the next, simply on account of the premise being strangers-to-lovers instead.
While Sloane and Glover's involvement in this project has set off the remake naysayers, it's a thrill getting to see what is essentially an Atlanta spin on a rom-com spy thriller. This is what Citadel could have been if it didn't feel like it had been written by an AI chatbot picking destination spots out of a tombola.
If we're going to be stuck in the reboot doom cycle for the foreseeable future, this shows how fresh soil can still be tilled in that field. As Prime Video was willing to give the dismal Citadel a second season, let's hope Mr & Mrs Smith gets similar treatment.
Mr & Mrs Smith is available to stream on Prime Video from February 2.
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Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
