Summary
Smoke is fittingly a slow burn in Episodes 1 & 2, but stick with the premiere – it eventually reveals a swerve that recontextualises the entire show.
Apple TV+ tends to premiere new shows with multiple episodes at once, and nowhere has that strategy paid off more than in Smoke, a listless and at times painfully hacky crime thriller from Dennis Lehane that takes two whole episodes to reveal what it’s really up to. You’ll want to tap out after Episode 1, and probably through a good chunk of Episode 2, but I strongly recommend you don’t. The climax of that second outing provides one of the great “Oh, okay!” moments in recent TV history.
And my goodness, did this show need it. Smoke comes across like the worst of both worlds because it’s the skeleton of a rote procedural with the flesh of a try-hard art piece. The narrative in these two episodes revolves around arson investigator Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton, teaming up with Lehane again after Black Bird) and his ex-military-turned-detective partner Michelle Calderone, investigating two parallel serial arson cases. One of the suspects lights fires in crowded locations – his favourite venue seems to be the potato chip aisle of grocery stores – and the other lights milk jugs full of accelerant on the porches of unsuspecting families. But there’s a tortuously hacky narration that is quickly revealed to be snippets from a laughably bad novel that Dave is writing, dramatically cribbing from his own terrifying experiences with fire.
The book thing is largely played for laughs, to be fair, but it doesn’t quite work at first because the show itself seems no better than the novel. The fear is that this is the kind of wannabe prestige thriller that thinks it’s subverting the form but is really just drawing attention to itself. That’s until the very end of the second episode, when it’s revealed in a last-minute stinger that Dave himself is the grocery store arsonist, a revelation that turns everything else completely on its head.
For what it’s worth, Dave isn’t the other arsonist, but we know who that guy is, too – a loner named Freddy Fasano who, across these opening episodes, is gently coaxed out of his shell by a hairdresser named Brenda who is attracted to his shyness. We know very little about him beyond the psychological profile that the police come up with, which suggests he lacks control and wants people whose lives he covets to feel that same sense of powerlessness. And as Dave’s novel clunkily explains, there’s nothing quite so crippling as being stuck in a fire.
Jurnee Smollett and Rafe Spall in Smoke | Image via Apple TV+
Dave and Michelle have both had their own close encounters with infernos. Dave was trapped in a burning building and ran towards what he believed was another firefighter, but turned out to be his own reflection, and he still has nightmares about the incident. There’s still more to be unravelled about Michelle’s backstory. What is clear, though, is that her career has stalled, which is presumably related to an ill-advised and quasi-abusive affair with a superior. More on this is also, one suspects, still to come.
Dave does, admittedly, get more of the focus. He seems like a relatively even-keeled family man, in a seemingly happy marriage with his wife, Ashley, and trying his best to dote on Emmett, her son from a previous relationship. But the cracks begin to emerge towards the end of Episode 2, so when the swerve into new territory occurs, the build-up retroactively makes more sense. It’s very smart in that regard and should hopefully regain the interest of any viewers whose interest was waning, providing they stuck around for that long.
And that’s the problem. I would imagine that if I weren’t professionally obligated to stick with Smoke, I’d have tapped out after the premiere, reasonably convinced I’d seen all it had to offer. That would have been quite the mistake, and I’m keen to let other people know they need to stick around. With the twist about Dave, all kinds of new storytelling possibilities are opened up – I’m not imagining, for instance, the obvious sexual chemistry he has with Michelle – that will hopefully give Smoke a bit more identity and edge. It’s adapted from a podcast called Firebug that I’m thankfully not familiar with, so nothing was ruined in advance, and I’m intrigued to see where it all might go next.
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