Reality television programming is once again turning to marriages—foundering and otherwise—to perk up its lineups. First, the FYI Network announced in April that it would give spouse-swapping another go with The Seven Year Switch, a series that would allow couples to test-drive a different partner. And now someone is planning to adapt the couples counseling guide that was Mr. & Mrs. Smith into a game show.
3 Ball Entertainment (a.k.a. Eyeworks USA), the company whose works include My Cat From Hell and Bar Rescue, is partnering with New Regency on the reality competition series. New Regency produced the romantic-comedy-action-homewrecking film that raked in nearly $500 million and ignited the real-life romance between its leads Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but whose real takeaway is probably promoting the super-couple moniker trend.
The competition will feature married couples “in a high-octane, high-stakes game” which will probably not just be a metaphor for staying together. 3 Ball and New Regency are getting into that secret-agent headspace and have demurred from sharing any further details, presumably because then they might have to kill us.
The announcement was made just weeks after the 10-year anniversary of the film, in which Pitt and Jolie play affluent marrieds who are bored with each other in and out of the bedroom, so they go in search of stimulation as assassins at rival assassins guilds or whatever. Because they fail to share vital information—e.g., their highly stressful jobs and double-life leading—with their marriage counselor, they resort to attempted murder to bring back the spark in their lives.