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Smoke Review: Apple’s Arson Thriller Occasionally Catches Fire


Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollett, Smoke

Apple TV+

It’s hard to say anything about Smoke without saying too much. A new series created by Dennis Lehane, it loosely adapts Firebug, a true crime podcast documenting the life of John Orr, but if you don’t want to have a revelation that arrives relatively late in Smoke‘s second episode spoiled, you shouldn’t click on that link or google Orr’s name. It spoils nothing to say that it’s thriller about arson investigation, but even this doesn’t quite capture the feel of a series that can’t quite make up its mind about what kind of show it wants to be as it swerves from scenes that feel like they belong to a dark psychological drama to stretches of black comedy, as if trying smush together Taxi Driver and Burn After Reading. That this ultimately proves futile isn’t particularly surprising, but Smoke gives it an earnest try anyway. The results aren’t entirely satisfying, but the moments that click into place, particularly those spotlighting performances that strike the balance the series attempts, suggest it was worth a try.

Taron Egerton, who previously starred in the acclaimed Lehane-created series Black Bird, stars as Dave Gudsen, an arson investigator somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. (The series’ cars sport license plates for the state of “Orrington.”) At night he sometimes has nightmares about his days as a firefighter, particularly a fire in which he found himself trapped and nearly died. Gudsen also serves as the series’ narrator, at least at first. An aspiring author, he’s begun writing down his thoughts about the nature of fire and his possession in a fledgling attempt to rework it into a novel. Who better to write about fire than one who’s been in the middle of it and seen what it can do?

It’s remarkable that Gudsen has any downtime to pursue his literary ambitions. As the series opens he’s on the trail of not one but two serial arsonists. One has been terrorizing the working class neighborhood of Trolley Town with incendiary devices made from milk jugs. The other has a more elaborate M.O., setting carefully timed fires in one location to distract the fire department from fires he sets elsewhere. As if that weren’t enough to keep Gudsen busy, he finds himself saddled with a partner, Detective Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett), a detective sent by the police department to assist him. It is not, to put it mildly, Calderone’s dream assignment. She’s been placed there after falling out of favor with her superiors for reasons the series reveals later. But she’s a quick study, both when it comes to arson and of her partner’s methods. Calderone has developed a thick skin. She even lets the way Gudsen stands a little too close to her and talks a little too suggestively slide without comment. She’s in the habit of seeing more than she says.

6.5

Smoke

Like

  • The details of the arson investigation and well-played colorful characters

Dislike

  • The show’s tone is all over the place

We learn the Trolley Town arsonist’s identity quickly. Freddy Fasano (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) works at a fast food chicken restaurant and spends his shifts dreaming of fire as he works the fryer. Mwine delivers an intense, unsettling performance, playing Fasano as an outsider so alienated he’s barely even able to communicate with others, but it also points to one of the series’ nagging issues. He’s a disturbing but shallowly considered character with a backstory of neglect that Smoke uses as shorthand to explain his pathology.

That’s a problem elsewhere in the series, too. Calderone gets her own tragic backstory, but Smollett’s savvy performance fleshes out the character, who’s revealed as a tough and canny operator capable of winning the trust of those she’s trying to snare. The always charismatic Egerton is best in the series’ early episodes, which allow him to play Gudsen as a winning guy who’s maybe just a little off. He’s less convincing the further Smoke unwinds his character, as his literary efforts hit a speed bump, Calderone’s presence becomes one distraction too many, and his marriage to Ashley (Hannah Emily Anderson) — a librarian who’s doing her best not to squash his dreams of penning a bestseller — starts to fall apart.

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Though it tells a self-contained story, Smoke is being set up as an ongoing series, and some of the most encouraging signs can be found in its supporting cast. Greg Kinnear, also returning from Black Bird, is particularly winning as Gudsen’s gruff boss, and Rafe Spall has a commanding presence as an alpha male detective who joins the case. But it’s a pair of late arrivers, John Leguizamo and Anna Chlumsky, who steal every scene in which they appear. Leguizamo plays a sleazy ex-cop with a grudge against Gudsen. Chlumsky plays an ATF agent with an Ivy League education and a passion for literature. Their unlikely buddy cop team often feels like it deserves a series of its own.

Instead they have to work within the confines of this intermittently successful, sometimes aggressively stylish, tonally wobbly, but undeniably compelling series that threatens to go fully off the rails thanks to some late-season twists. But anyone who gets that far — and Smoke makes it easy to want to see what happens next — will, like Calderone, want to see it through to the end anyway.

Premieres: Friday, June 27 on Apple TV+ with two episodes, followed by a new episode each week
Who’s in it: Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, Greg Kinnear
Who’s behind it: Dennis Lehane
For fans of: Dark crime dramas
How many episodes we watched: 9 of 9



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