“Do you want to kiss me? Not as dogs this time, just actually...
” That’s Maya Erskine as Jane, who’s ready to renege on the “no romance” agreement made earlier with her faux-husband, John (Donald Glover), in “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
” But that was before the semi-amateur spies accidentally killed John Turturro’s billionaire character after he subjected them to his dog fornication fetish. Now, Jane and John forget their platonic vow and go for it, silhouetted against a candy-colored TV cartoon blaring zanily in the background. It’s an inventive piece of staging from Hiro Murai, Emmy nominated for directing the pilot of Prime Video’s “Mr & Mrs.
Smith.” (Murai also earned nominations as an executive producer of both “Smith” and “The Bear.”) Speaking from his Silver Lake home, the USC-educated filmmaker, whose previous Glover collaborations include “Atlanta” and the Childish Gambino music video “This Is America,” talks about mastering the sad comedy/funny drama TV space to build a millennial-friendly take on what it means to be a spy in 2024.
(He also explains what happens when a spy cat goes rogue.) “Mr. & Mrs.
Smith,” officially a drama, has a lot of comedy. Do you like to mix and match when it comes to tone? What I think is most interesting in a TV show is the in-between-ness of genres, so I’m very mindful of subverting expectations in anything we make. For “Mr.
& Mrs. Smith,” the expectation going in is probably the Brad Pitt-Angel.