Dennis Lehane adapts the podcast "Firebug," about the hunt for a serial arsonist, into a nine-part drama series.
I'm sure I've referred to Jurnee Smollett as a "passionate" actress at some point. The star of Lovecraft Country and Friday Night Lights displays a ferocious, unbridled intensity in a captivating and reliable way.
Creator: Dennis Lehane
Stars: Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, Rafe Spall
Smollett stood right next to the unconvincing CGI fire in last year's exceptional film, The Order. Before that, she starred alongside burning crosses (Lovecraft Country) and torches (Underground). Now she's diving headfirst into hell in Apple TV+'s new drama series, Smoke, an adaptation of the podcast Firebug, featuring extraordinary performances and a bit of a technical inconsistency.
At nine episodes, the Dennis Lehane-created series is overly long and frustratingly repetitive, but it unravels a fascinating mystery, features one of the summer's best casts, and poses big ideas that don't always come together clearly.
Smollett plays Michelle Calderon, a detective on a Pacific Northwest police force. Burned (metaphorically, not literally) by a recently ended romance with her boss (Steven Burk, played by Rafe Spall), and still burned (emotionally, not literally) by a fire her mother set when she was a child, Michelle is assigned to partner with arson investigator Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton).
Dave, a former firefighter, needs help, as two serial arsonists—dubbed the Divide and Conquer Arsonist and the Milk Jug Arsonist—are active in the city, and his kindly boss, Harvey Englehart (played by Greg Kinnear), is growing impatient. He's slowly growing impatient, of course, because the D&C arsonist has apparently already set over 200 fires, and the irritation is only just starting to show.
People care a little less about the Milk Jug arsonist, who's been stalking the city's poorest neighborhood, though we're soon introduced to a suspect: Freddy (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), a sad-eyed, mumbling fast-food worker.
Busy with the two arsonists, his new partner, and a precarious marriage to Ashley (Hannah Emily Anderson), Dave does what any sensible person would do: he starts writing a book about an arson investigator with a new partner chasing a serial arsonist.
Soon, Dave and Michelle's obsessions escalate, and cat-and-mouse games ensue.
It's a series full of unexpected twists, including an early revelation that forms the main premise of the podcast and the series. Chances are you'll discover this twist long before it's officially revealed, at least one episode later than ideal. There's a thrilling final twist that isn't exactly "guessable," and a key final twist that the series doesn't execute visually as well as it should. Yes, I'm being vague, but the truth is that Smoke works not because it's surprising, but because it's enjoyable to watch each character's wheels turn.
Due to the presence of Lehane, Egerton, and Kinnear, Smoke is likely to be compared to the solid 2022 miniseries Black Bird, which won a well-deserved Emmy for Paul Walter Hauser.
The Apple TV+ series with which Smoke has the most in common is Alfonso Cuarón's Disclaimer, an exploration of what happens when we try to narrativize real life and impose the hero/villain dichotomy on complex human behavior, disguised as a revenge drama. Smoke focuses on definition and self-definition, something you'll likely decipher by choosing to begin each episode with the definition of several easy-to-define words, such as "creativity," which is "to bring something into existence; to produce through imagination."
Michelle is defined by external factors, whether it's her mother's criminal acts, the power of the man she's sleeping with, or, due to the intolerance of her profession, her race and gender.
Dave doesn't even have those defining elements. His story is seemingly sad, but vague. His work accomplishments are insignificant, his marital success limited. But as he tries to become the hero of his own story, he sees a path to glory, or possibly notoriety.
Egerton, for reasons that will soon become obvious, has the tougher job, oscillating between level-headedness and kindness to a more daring weirdness that bears an uncanny resemblance to the classic Christian Slater. Dave never quite projects himself as a "real" person, and this performance could only work in a show with this kind of self-aware approach. Here, it works perfectly, especially opposite Smollett, who digs deep to find the pain of a woman trying to transform herself physically—particularly in the first episode, where she devotes a lot of time to fitness—and professionally.
Kinnear falls into the understated category, quietly heartbreaking as one of the many men whose commitment to work has come at the expense of their ordinary humanity, while Spall aggressively oscillates between sympathy and disgust, seemingly more for narrative than logical reasons. The cast gets a major boost midseason with the arrival of John Leguizamo, equally funny and vulnerable as Dave's disgraced former partner, and Anna Chlumsky, hilariously disdainful as a law enforcement officer who gets caught up in the chaos of the story.
Mwine deserves special praise, arguably the best performance in the series. There are aspects of Freddy's character—a victim of the foster care system with various unspecified social difficulties—that border on several stereotypes. But Mwine conveys a lost, angry, and fundamentally lonely man in such a disturbing way that I often wished Lehane and company had given him more to do.
There are stretches, especially in the second half of the season, where Smoke starts directly stating and repeating his themes in ways that simultaneously spoil at least one twist and often make me wonder if those underscored points had ever been truly illustrated or justified by the show. These were moments that suggest Smoke could have been improved with a six-episode season, or nine episodes with less redundancy and more room to delve into the economic inequalities of this fictional city and the challenges of modern firefighting.
It's worth noting that, even though I'm a resident of a Los Angeles still recovering from the January wildfires, until the very end, very little in Smoke made me reflect on them. This proves once again that the series is simultaneously real and, at the same time, insulated from reality. When you have such a convoluted story, with dialogue as strong as Lehane typically delivers and stars like the passionate Smollett, these limitations don't usually doom even an imperfect series.
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