I nearly didn't watch this because I assumed it'd just be a mediocre knock-off of a mediocre movie and that Donald Glover was only in it for the money. Oh me of little faith. Is Glover ever doing anything just for the money at this point? Not this. Part-written by him, it's got the same near surreal quality as Atlanta, the same willingness to make wild shifts in tone, pace and genre convention and the same brilliant eye and ear for idiosyncratic characters.
This last is a particular joy, with standout appearances from Parker Posey and John Turturro each doing some of their best work, though the lesser-known Wagner Moura is at least equally good.
The story's implicitly fantastical universe involving a mysterious private spy agency with bottomless resources is reminiscent of John Wick, but there the joke, if there even was one, wore tissue-thin as the writers felt forced to create ever more complicated lore to make sense of it all. Here the workings are kept neatly and mysteriously in the background, at least for now in the first season, leaving us free to absorb ourselves in character and story - of which there is far more than in John Wick.
You can imagine it all beginning with Glover and writing partner Francesca Sloane, who also worked on Atlanta, watching the original Mr. And Mrs. Smith and saying, 'This could have been so great if...' It's the same thematic game: a couple's involvement in spying used as a metaphor for relationship trust issues. But where the movie played it for superficial laughs, this uses its indie dramedy sensibility to go deep, taking lengthy breaks from the shoot-em-ups to depict some of the most painfully relatable bickering I've ever seen in fiction, the couple getting hung up on seeming trivia, always struggling to work out who they are, who the other is and whether they can make the two align.
Eat your heart out Bergman, Updike, Ibsen, Woody Allen etc. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Not saying this is hands-down better than those illustrious predecessors (Ibsen definitely still pips it), just that I can't think when I've seen this particular kind of wrangling done better.
This last is a particular joy, with standout appearances from Parker Posey and John Turturro each doing some of their best work, though the lesser-known Wagner Moura is at least equally good.
The story's implicitly fantastical universe involving a mysterious private spy agency with bottomless resources is reminiscent of John Wick, but there the joke, if there even was one, wore tissue-thin as the writers felt forced to create ever more complicated lore to make sense of it all. Here the workings are kept neatly and mysteriously in the background, at least for now in the first season, leaving us free to absorb ourselves in character and story - of which there is far more than in John Wick.
You can imagine it all beginning with Glover and writing partner Francesca Sloane, who also worked on Atlanta, watching the original Mr. And Mrs. Smith and saying, 'This could have been so great if...' It's the same thematic game: a couple's involvement in spying used as a metaphor for relationship trust issues. But where the movie played it for superficial laughs, this uses its indie dramedy sensibility to go deep, taking lengthy breaks from the shoot-em-ups to depict some of the most painfully relatable bickering I've ever seen in fiction, the couple getting hung up on seeming trivia, always struggling to work out who they are, who the other is and whether they can make the two align.
Eat your heart out Bergman, Updike, Ibsen, Woody Allen etc. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Not saying this is hands-down better than those illustrious predecessors (Ibsen definitely still pips it), just that I can't think when I've seen this particular kind of wrangling done better.