Although the premise of married spies has since proven to be a very lucrative one, the show itself received poor ratings and reviews, and was cancelled nine episodes in. “To be honest, ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ is a mess, a suspense-romance that tries too hard and delivers too little on both sides of the hyphen,” wrote one critic in The Gettysburg Times. “How many times can this series rewrite the same premise?” asked another critic just four episodes in. When the show was cancelled and replaced with the returning drama “JAG,” critics couldn’t help but point out how uniquely definitive the cancellation was. “In a rare move, CBS actually used the C-word, instead of the euphemistic ‘on hiatus,'” wrote The New York Daily News. “The drama is history. It won’t air again.”
There are a lot of reasons the show was cancelled, but one thing that certainly didn’t help was CBS’s tendency to switch up the order of the episodes, which was a problem for a show that was slightly more serialized than most shows of its time. “CBS made a late episode switch to one that already has ‘Mrs. Smith’ jealous of a woman who makes a play for her partner,” one critic noted. “Last week, it seemed as though she couldn’t stand him.”
Lenhart himself noted that he and Sakmar wanted the show’s second episode, “The Suburban Episode,” to be the fourth. “[The network] said suburbia, that’s what they want the show to be … we wanted to save our suburban episode for the fourth so we could establish the glamour and the high tech and the intrigue and that stuff. So then being in suburbia would seem kind of like, ‘Oh, this is odd now.'”