There are long stretches of Apple TV’s “Smoke” that work. It’s a carefully calibrated, well-made show with grounded performances and a thrilling mystery. After a relatively traditional set-up, it takes a hard right turn into something very different (although listeners of the podcast on which it’s based, “Firebug,” will know what’s up, at least until this story goes very different places). Still, it stays compelling, telling competing stories of how trauma can harden people into the worst versions of themselves. Until it doesn’t. One can feel the rickety rollercoaster start to shake around the sixth or seventh episode before it jumps the track in the penultimate chapter and just recklessly careens through everything set up by the show before then. Forget suspension of belief—you’ve got to light it on fire to enjoy this one.
While the big twist that gives “Smoke” its direction is given away relatively early (and in a podcast), I’ll be nice to the spoiler averse and do my best to talk around it. When the show opens, a famous arson investigator named Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton) is working to capture a pair of serial fire-starters around town. One sets fires in crowded places, such as lighting potato chip bags (which are apparently quite flammable) in populated grocery stores and then walking away. The fire scenes in early episodes, which include things like flesh dripping from a woman escaping one of the store fires, are truly terrifying. Whoever is doing this is a sociopath, someone drawn to the destructive power of fire at any cost. Gudsen, who gives seminars in which he romantically espouses on the unique nature of flame, seems like the perfect cat to this mouse, a man who is willing to look into the eyes of a maniac because he might have a little of that in him too.
Similarly hardened by the flame is Detective Michell Calderon (Jurnee Smollett), who is brought in by her boss and romantic partner, Steven Burk (Rafe Spall), to help Gudsen, both of them answering to a superior played well by a gruff Greg Kinnear. Calderon’s back story is brutal, seared by a mother who purposefully set a fire in a building in which a young Michell was still residing. She has seen firsthand how fire can rip families apart, making her another perfect predator for the two parallel arsonists tearing through the city.
As Calderon and Gudsen try to find one arsonist, “Smoke” tracks a likely suspect in another series of fires, a loner named Freddy Fasano (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine). Large sections of the first half of the series are spent with Freddy, the kind of man who seems to prefer to blend into the scenery until the kindness of a hairdresser named Brenda (Adina Porter) seems to bring him out of his shell. An effective character actor, Mwine transforms Freddy into a walking ghost, a man so traumatized by life that he just wants to disappear. He’s not as much a reflection of how hurt people hurt people, but how empty people hurt people. When he tries to be full again, tragedy ensues.
How does Freddy’s arc relate to the other arsonist? Here’s where “Smoke” starts to falter. Created by the brilliant Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone”), the show reaches for social and even psychological commentary on how no two sociopaths are the same by presenting one who’s brazen alongside one who’s almost invisible. It’s the extrovert vs. the introvert.
But, for whatever reason, the writers of “Smoke” refuse to connect the dots in the back half of the season, allowing Freddy’s arc to end rather disappointingly as the show shifts to the flashier villain of the piece in ways that get increasingly ridiculous. Without spoiling, the show gets incredibly dumb, especially in how it totally betrays Calderon for a series of twists that don’t gel with the character work Smollett has done up to that point. It seems like someone decided that the end of the show needed to reach for “look, everyone’s a bad choice away from being a villain” when the show doesn’t set that table for seven hours. At all.
That said, the performances are so much better than most streaming shows (and the strong direction and cinematography help) that it’s almost worth a look. Egerton, who reunites with Lehane after working together on the superior “Black Bird,” always makes interesting choices, and Smollett plays a badass well. They have an unexpected chemistry, playing people who know how to read other human beings differently than most mortals, and they hold the show together in ways that other performers couldn’t. The whole cast works, especially a charming turn from John Leguizamo as a disgraced former partner of Gudsen who has no fucks left to give. He’s one of the few elements of this overlong show that I actually wanted more of. He’s great.
As a fan of Lehane, Egerton, Smollett, Leguizamo—pretty much all of this—I really wanted “Smoke” to work. And it does for so long that the decisions of the final two hours are all the more disappointing. Maybe it’s actually better not to burn out.
Whole series screened for review. Starts on Apple TV on June 27th.
