Revivals, reboots, reimaginings, and resurrections are not considered a genre, but you could have fooled Hollywood. Many of these efforts surface on a regular basis, and only a few rise to the top of the crop. Those successes include Prime Video/Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which was an unexpectedly essential reimagining that hailed from the minds of co-creators Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane. The other necessary ingredient in this spy-action series happens to be Maya Erskine, who helped deliver a layered edition of John and Jane Smith as well as an expanded world for their missions.
Also, we received a realistic and funny take on a couple’s first farts and eight episodes showing how they circled each other romantically while disposing of bodies. This gave us much more than the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt-starring movie of yesteryear, and Amazon didn’t waste time in announcing a renewal. However, a claimed bit of bad news also arrived, so let’s discuss what has been floating around the rumor mill and whether it’s true.
Plot
This is a tricky topic. After all, part of the beauty of the Mr. & Mrs. Smith series is the idea that John and Jane Smiths are everywhere, which does bring the end of John Wick 2 to mind. Glover’s John discovered that there were other Johns and Janes to socialize with (and dislike and later fear) when Wagner Moura showed up with Parker Posey in tow. Heck, the first moments of the show dared to unveil these two sexy assassins (Alexander Skarsgård and Eiza González) enjoying some quiet porch time with a little squirrel buddy before they were (probably) wiped off the map:
Also, Glover’s John killed a wayward John on that super-high-risk mission in the jungle! So, the series already had a built-in mechanism to anthologize itself with new leading couples for follow-up seasons, but contradiction exists surrounding a recent report, and we gotta hash this out.
The first season ended on a cliffhanger with Maya and Donald’s Jane and John seemingly corned in a panic room with a single bullet and Parker Posey’s Jane waiting outside to kill them after they’d gone rogue. It didn’t look good.
Then the second-renewal announcement arrived, and Variety reported word from nameless “sources” who “say that Season 1 stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are not expected to return to star in Season 2.” No response came from Amazon, Glover, or Erskine, and although it’s tempting to simply take the report at face value, it sounds like a “not so fast” exists.
Showrunner Francesca Sloane did decide to talk about that report to Entertainment Weekly, and in the process, Sloane revealed that she and Donald found the report awfully funny, especially since they cannot respond with detail, or they would “ruin” the season cliffhanger:
“I was just talking to Donald last night about this and we were laughing, because one of the pieces of press said, ‘according to our sources,’ and we’re like, ‘Who are these sources?’ We wrote a cliffhanger, we thought about it long and hard. It was one of the first things that we wrote. Why in the world — we haven’t said anything — but why in the world would we ruin a cliffhanger based on a headline?”
Exactly. I’d love to see Glover and Erskine again, but you know, I also wouldn’t be mad at a prequel season with Skarsgård and González’s story. [Cough]
Cast
I can only gather that Prime Video/Amazon knows exactly what they are doing with the mixed signals. Maybe Donald and Maya will star again, or simply make cameos, or perhaps the show could bring back Michaela Coel or Paul “Hot Neighbor” Dano. Stay tuned for updates, which shall surely come.
Release Date
This isn’t a special-effects heavy show, so it’s possible that 2025 could see a return if the now-pregnant Maya Erskine does not continue as Jane. If Donald and Maya do return, then the wait will likely be longer.
Trailer
Oh, the idea of a trailer is funny right now. However, Donald and Maya paid a June 2024 visit to Jimmy Kimmel and carefully avoided confirming or denying whether their characters survived the first season finale. Those stinkers.