Smoke Review

Smoke, the new thriller from AppleTV+ is a strange series. Not in its subject matter, which is pretty straight forward and easy to follow. But in its writing, its characters, and in several of its leading performances, it was often hard to figure out if the show was trying to be a serious thriller or a deeply satirical look at how broken people can easily explain to themselves just why they do pretty horrific things – or even how they manage to pretend that they could never possibly be the type of person to commit those acts (mere moments after we see them do it). Perhaps the most frustrating part of the series is that it has assembled one hell of a cast who are certainly capable of churning out a prestige drama about an attempt to track down and catch two arsonists in the Pacific Northwest and yet we’re presented with whatever the heck this show is as a result.

Now comes the part of the review where I have to give you a bit about the story, but it’s hard to do that without spoiling things. Essentially, the series is the tale of Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton, chewing the scenery throughout with a suspect American accent to boot), an arson investigator who is chasing down two concurrent arsonists setting fires in and around his Pacific Northwest community. Much to his annoyance, the local PD assigns Detective Michell Calderon (Jurnee Smollett, who is doing a lot of capital-A acting but is pretty great throughout), who naturally has her own tragic backstory that deals with a fire and who also has a heck of a messy personal life – all of which factors into the story. Calderon is having an on-again/off-again affair with her boss, Steven Burk (Rafe Spall, who is turning in a great American accent), while the local police chief Harvey Englehart (a great Greg Kinnear) continues to have faith in his good pal Gudsen – who also has some important dirt on him – even when it seems like Gudsen might have lost the plot. Later in the story, Adina Porter, Anna Chlumsky, and John Leguizamo all factor into the tale. So, lots of excellent actors, but boy is this story a mess.

If you’ve seen the trailer for the series or know that it’s based on the story of real-life arsonist John Leonard Orr, you can probably guess just what the lynch pin twist of the tale is. The series takes too long to expose it to us – and then takes even longer to let the character involved fully accept that they are who they really are in a really strange tic of the writing. But during that time, we get some truly impressive narrative swings that cause nearly every character to act wholly out of character at various points in the story. Take Calderon. She’s recklessly having an affair with her superior officer – which is a pretty common trope when it comes to female law enforcement characters. At the same time, she finds out that her mother, who has been in prison for a crime involving her, their home, and a fire, for twenty years (we don’t learn precisely what went down until the end of the season) is coming up for parole and her brother wants her to provide a statement asking for her release. She’s also rehabbing a home, all on her own. She has some serious anger issues, yet still has an uncanny ability to work her way out of any professional jam she finds herself in. She’s such a mix of tropes and magical plot armor that it’s hard to take her seriously as a complete character. Throughout the series, Gudsen is working on a truly atrocious semi-autobiographical novel and really, the things he comes up with seem pretty similar to the backstories of the characters in Smoke.

I was honestly ready to stop watching after the second episode until I saw the mixed to positive review from Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone and figured if he made it through, so could I. By mid-season (the entire season was provided for review), I was so fascinated with how poorly structured the story was, and how the characters managed to both be thinly drawn archetypes and also imbued with so many crazy pieces of backstory, that I kept watching out of utter fascination with just how showrunner Denis Lehane (who was also behind the very uneven AppleTV+ series Blackbird, which also starred Egerton) was going to land this series. And by the time a character flew through a car windshield after a crash in a burning forest and managed to not only be mostly uninjured but then manage to subdue and arrest the series’ villain, well, I just figured this was a show where you need to fully suspend your sense of disbelief to truly appreciate it.

Is it worth a watch? If you’re an Egerton super fan, perhaps. Or if you want to spend eight weeks marveling at just how scattershot a series with this level of pedigree in front of the camera can be, it’s pretty impressive to see some of our best working actors asked to deliver lines like:

“I asked for a warrant.” – said with glee and joy.

“I got you the warrant.” – said with just as much glee and joy.

Perhaps what made me so frustrated with Smoke is that there’s a good show lurking underneath all the schizophrenic writing and character twists and turns. Egerton is very good at playing the character he’s asked to play – although he also plays him so big at times that it’s impossible to see how everyone around him didn’t start to question everything about Gudsen’s personality from the jump. And Smollett is an exceptional actor, but there’s just so much going on with Calderon that it’s hard to fully invest in the character when she’s being pulled from subplot to subplot. Once Leguizamo and Chlumsky (who is criminally underused) enter the story, there’s a really fun task force story arc that I wish was the real story being told – but like everything else in the show, that arc gets cut off far too soon. So, as it is, Smoke is much more of a miss than a hit. There are plenty more shows out there that are worth your time more than this one.

Smoke premieres on AppleTV+ on June 27 with two episodes. All nine episode of the series were provided for review.