Fiction turns out to be the truth in Smoke, Apple TV+’s latest crime drama, whose story is inspired by Firebug, a 2021 podcast about a series of 1980s California fires that investigators believed were the handiwork of a serial arsonist.
Created and co-written by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) and headlined by his Black Bird star Taron Egerton, this nine-episode thriller, premiering June 27, is both a sharp psychological profile of unique criminals and a taut cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and their targets. It’s also, however, a show with about as much restraint as its fiends, sabotaging its frequently gripping action via a handful of crucial over-the-top contrivances.
In a suburban Pacific Northwest enclave, on-the-outs Detective Michell Calderon (Jurnee Smollett) is assigned to partner with chief arson investigator Dave Gudsen (Egerton), who’s had little luck catching two separate fire-obsessed maniacs.
Dave has dubbed the first the “DNC arsonist” because of his divide-and-conquer strategy of setting multiple blazes at once—generally in the potato chip aisles of grocery stores—in order to spread the police force thin. The other is a madman who fills milk jugs with flammable fry oil and ignites them in businesses, doorways, and random spots about town.
Together, these two pyromaniacs have put Dave on, yes, the hot seat with his boss Harvey Englehart (Greg Kinnear), who’s eager for this scourge to end.
Dave is a gregarious guy with a big smile and an outgoing personality, and he immediately meshes with Michell, creating a sarcastic, trash-talking dynamic that makes their early scenes together an amusing pleasure.
Despite their cheery exteriors, though, neither is on solid ground. Dave is married (for the third time) to Ashley (Hannah Emily Anderson), who views him with a wary eye and isn’t happy about his contentious relationship with (and thinly veiled disinterest in) her teen son Emmett (Luke Roessler), who’s struggling with the sudden departure of his biological father.
Michell, meanwhile, is managing an affair with her superior, Captain Steven Burk (Rafe Spall), that’s gone sideways—his decision to leave his wife and kids for her stirs her flight instinct. She’s additionally coping with the upcoming parole hearing of her mother, whose incarceration, it’s suggested by fragmentary flashbacks, is related to a childhood incident in which Michell was locked in a burning room’s closet.
Because of the milk jug arsonist’s preferred choice of accelerant, Dave suspects that he works at one of the area’s myriad fast-food joints. Smoke reveals that he’s right on the money by depicting the days and nights of Freddy Fasano (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), a cook at Coop’s Friend Chicken.
Freddy is a middle-aged loner with a glazed expression and zombie-like way of speaking, and while he’s friendly and appealing enough to attract the attention of regular customer Brenda (Adina Porter), who cuts hair at a nearby salon, his social life amounts to chitchat with a going-nowhere coworker and watching porn on his laptop.
Thanks in part to Mwine’s creepily vacant turn, Smoke’s portrait of this unhinged outcast provides it with some of its best sequences, affording a window into a psyche fractured by years of abuse, neglect, and solitude, all of which have hollowed him out save for his consuming rage.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
As they hunt for Freddy, Dave and Michell deduce that the DNC arsonist is likely one of their own, compelling them to look into firemen—a hunch that results in a shocking (if unhelpful) discovery by Michell that concludes with someone being shot very close to the crotch.
Smoke effectively teases this mystery, but it’s not long before it discloses the culprit’s identity: Dave, whose deep-seated egomania, resentment, and fury fuel his rampage.
This means that he’s playing both sides, including Michell and Harvey. Egerton’s characterization grows deeper and more sinister in the aftermath of this bombshell, casting Dave’s early joviality as a mask donned to disguise his true self, and his confidence as a sign of his severe narcissism. Better yet, he’s well-paired with Smollett, who gives a terrific performance as a tough-as-nails woman forced to shoulder a variety of interconnected traumatic ordeals.
Like in real life, Smoke’s protagonist is writing a fictional book about arson investigation that functions as a confessional manifesto about his own wrongdoing—a wild twist that would seem absurd if it weren’t rooted in reality.
Nonetheless, Lehane intermittently pushes things into corny and outlandish corners, whether it’s by paralleling Dave and Michell to extreme lengths—culminating with a shocking late act that flirts with ludicrousness—or staging his climactic showdown in the most cartoonishly sensationalistic (and sexualized) manner imaginable. These ideas work thematically more than they do dramatically, and the effect is to destabilize the entire affair; even for a tale about daring murderers, they resonate as fanciful only-on-TV conceits.
Smoke is best when it’s ensnaring its characters (including, eventually, John Leguizamo’s disgraced former officer and Anna Chlumsky’s DEA agent) in a tangled web of deceit, rage, and transgressions, all as it portrays them as more than villainous and less than noble.
The series’ clean and evocative widescreen imagery enhances the material’s undercurrents, and a closing surprise regarding Dave is so apt that one wishes it had been hinted at more consistently during the preceding episodes. It’s certainly more novel than the fact that Dave, a dude who projects and compensates like there’s no tomorrow, is literally impotent, requiring in most cases a pill to get himself aroused with his wife or some of the other women his orbit—a detail that feels too writerly by half.
Lehane imagines Dave and Michell in three compelling dimensions and then goes overboard with add-ons, some of which hit (an extramarital tryst in which Dave dances about in a robe and underwear like David Bowie-via-Buffalo Bill) and some of which miss (the proceedings’ slow-mo vistas of cascading flames and raining embers).
Perhaps with fewer installments, Smoke might have been forced to discard some of its less authentic elements. Such gratuitousness, however, isn’t enough to totally choke the life out of this inquiry into secrets, lies, and the fiery (self-)destruction left in their wake.
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