Smoke starts with a bang—or two bangs, actually. The first comes in the show’s title sequence, the music of which might have you wondering, “Wait, don’t those four descending notes sound kinda like the beginning of ‘Everything In Its Right Place’—and, actually, isn’t that Thom Yorke singing?” (That is the Radiohead frontman, who wrote this new Apple TV+ show’s theme, “Dialing In.”) And the second arrives just after that, in Smoke‘s first scene, which is like a much dumber version of the intro to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, with an author attempting to get at the profundity of fires over striking slow-mo footage of flames engulfing structures. (After some throat-clearing and scrapped sentences, this particular narrator sounds more confident as he cooks up lines like “Fire doesn’t give a fuck about your wallet or the size of your gun or the size of your dick you wish was the size of your gun.”)
The aspiring novelist here is Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton), a chief arson investigator tasked with stopping the fires plaguing a scenic slice of the Pacific Northwest who has one doozy of an aw-shucks, high-pitched, nice-guy accent that doesn’t get any less annoying over the show’s nine hourlong episodes. (The actor gives a pretty showyperformance throughout, which can get tiresome too.) And the snippets we get of the terrible book he’s writing, one that centers a thinly-veiled, strong-jawed version of himself as he becomes a hero, are the funniest things about Smoke, with Gudsen’s prose often bordering on Garth Marenghi territory. Here’s a self-satisfied sampling: “He felt his heart stir—yes, his heart, but other parts of him as well.” There’s also a bit where he describes a fictionalized take on his new partner/disgraced detective/fellow mommy-issues sufferer Michelle Calderone (Lovecraft Country‘s Jurnee Smollett) as getting immediately turned on by his touch in a way that calls to mind this scene from Delocated.
All of the above—Yorke, those delicious bits of humor and delusion, the literally fiery scenes, and that real sense of tall-trees-and-dive-bars place (the show’s fictional city of Umberland was mostly filmed in Vancouver)—bodes well for this series, as does its creator. Dennis Lehane (the writer of Gone Baby Gone, among several big novels that have been adapted into films, as well as episodes of The Wire) teaming up once more with his Black Bird collaborator Egerton (as with that Apple miniseries, the actor is an EP on this) suggests a pretty high level of confidence and prestige. And Smoke has both: The show can be wonderful just to take in, with occasionally dim cinematography that’s reminiscent of David Fincher films and stylish direction by the likes of Kari Skogland (The Falcon And The Winter Soldier). And the cast beyond the two leads of Egerton and Smollett is stacked: Greg Kinnear plays a mustachioed, no-whiskey-shots-on-a-work-night fire department commander; Anna Chlumsky takes on an undercover operative with shades of her Veep character’s wide-eyed frustrations; and John Leguizamo tackles a feisty alcoholic who describes his ex-partner, Gudsen, as “this odd fucking anal abscess of a human being who should have his eyes plucked out and his balls cut off and tossed in a punchbowl full of chlamydia.”
But that’s where much of the good news ends. There are a few big twists in Smoke, which is based on the true-crime podcast Firebug, and two of them are dropped quite early in the miniseries’ run. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but, unfortunately, the cat-and-mouse chases after those reveals lose steam in the show’s back half and can feel like they’re prolonging inevitable, albeit stylishly presented, ends. (That said, a curveball concerning a slow-talking and seemingly shell-shocked cook who’s played by Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine breathes new life into the narrative.) The success of stories like this—in podcast, TV, or any form—largely rests on sucking you in to the point that you have to know what happens next or at least want to hang out with these people. And Smoke doesn’t pull that off. What’s more, there are some glaring questions that are tough to shake: If, for instance, the chips sections of a certain grocery store chain are constantly being lit up, wouldn’t you stake them out? And if there’s a fatal fire that is covered on the news, wouldn’t Calderone, whose job it is to investigate fires, have heard about it? Smoke has some real things to say about delusion, the stories we tell ourselves, and the trauma behind them. It’s just too bad that its thrills so often flame out.
