Chef That! Beef Ribs with Michelle and Andrew Muñoz
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Magazine
9 hours ago
- Time Magazine
Breaking Down the Smoldering Finale of Smoke
Warning: This post has spoilers for the finale of nine episodes, Smoke traced destruction as it traveled from suburban streets and storefronts into more figurative places—the dark recesses of identity, the fragile façades to which people cling in order to survive. By the season finale, "Mirror Mirror," long-buried truths surface, demanding a reckoning as emotional as it is inevitable. Creator Dennis Lehane always envisioned a climax that erupted on every level. "It's such a cliché, but I wanted to have an explosive finale," he tells TIME. "This is a show about fire. We've been promising them fire, so we're going to give them the fire of all fires. We wanted to go as big as we can—just go for broke, and if we miss, we miss." That eruption plays out most vividly through the series' two central figures. If Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett) serves as its moral compass, Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton) is its shape-shifter, the man whose presence destabilizes every scene because even his sense of self is built on deception. Over the season, he was both predator and partner, the charming investigator and the arsonist hiding in plain sight. By the end, the armor he constructed—and the story he's told so often he nearly believes it—has crumbled. Into the growing inferno The finale opens in the aftermath of Michelle's darkest act. In the penultimate episode, "Mercy," she accidentally wounded Captain Burke (Rafe Spall)—her colleague and former lover—then let him die, torching his home to eliminate the evidence. Before fleeing, she planted a glove bearing Gudsen's DNA, crafting a false trail. Now, in "Mirror Mirror," she struggles to steady herself, continuing to investigate alongside Gudsen while her composure falters beneath the surface. Her act of arson ignites something far more catastrophic: an uncontained wildfire rising from Burke's ruins, flames roaring as windborne embers spiral into the dark. She and Gudsen drive headlong toward the blaze, racing through the woods while heat presses in and smoke thickens the air—until the path reveals itself to be a trap. Gudsen, unmasked earlier as one of the two serial arsonists she's been hunting, unbuckles her seat belt and wrenches the wheel, sending them into a crash designed to kill her. Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire" pulses as Michelle—not dead—ties back her hair, preparing for battle. Gudsen crawls from the wreckage; she kicks him, slams him against the car, and presses the barrel of a gun into his mouth. She doesn't pull the trigger. Instead, a storm breaks—rain cascading in a moment of symbolic and literal cleansing. "[It's] as clean as Michelle's gonna get in that moment," Lehane says. "She's pushed this all the way, and there's nothing left to do. Because if it didn't rain at that moment, something bad could have happened to Dave." The downpour pulls her back from crossing an irreversible line. As rain drenches them both, she reads him his rights. For Lehane, the scene's tension lies partly in its soundtrack. Many of the show's song selections were his. ("That's where I really do feel a bit like an auteur," he adds.) He crafted the entire sequence around Nilsson's drum solo, playing it endlessly in the writers room. "When I shot that, I said to the creative team, 'Look, guys, we are doing this to Harry Nilsson's 'Jump Into the Fire,'' Lehane recalls. When the initial cut used different music, he personally recut the scene to match Nilsson's rhythm, and the editor ultimately agreed it was the right move. "We worked that to the bone to get it exactly where I wanted it." It's a primal, visual crescendo he conceived during what he calls a "mad scientist" burst in the Los Angeles writers' room, scribbling notes while listening to the Oppenheimer soundtrack. "I love 'Go Big or Go Home' moments," he says. "I don't do them much... I like to twist, twist, and twist. But this was a big moment." A battle of damaged wills After their confrontation in the woods, Michelle delivers Gudsen to a waiting Jeep, where Esposito (John Leguizamo) greets her with an air of triumph. Back at Columbia Metro Police Headquarters, the station falls silent as officers watch Gudsen enter, their contempt palpable. In the station bathroom, Michelle catches her reflection, and then sees him—Burke—not in the mirror, but in her mind, planting a warning that if anyone discovers their affair, the truth could unravel everything she's accomplished. In the interrogation room, things shift to psychological warfare. Gudsen weaves stories, reframes evidence, accuses Michelle of bias, and dismisses the glove bearing his DNA as circumstantial. He maintains he was merely investigating, but Michelle counters with his manuscript, cross-referencing it with actual unsolved arson cases and highlighting details only the perpetrator, or someone with access to classified files, could possess. Still, he deflects. Perhaps a lawyer leaked the report. Maybe a private investigator shared too much. Then Esposito sends Michelle a photograph: the disguise Gudsen wore during the hardware store attack, discovered in a hidden compartment of his impounded car. Even confronted with this evidence, he refuses to confess. It's a standoff Lehane and Smollett dissected at length during filming. "I call [Jurnee] my thespian queen," he says. "At this point, Michelle is desperate. Let's call a spade a spade—she started the incident that caused all this. Her morality is compromised by the end. She's interrogating Dave for a murder she committed and destruction she caused. Yet she's pursuing justice, which we all want. We all want Dave brought to justice." Gudsen's strategy remains unchanged. "He will deny, deny, deny, and attack, attack, attack," Lehane explains. "He refuses to let truth penetrate, but when it slips through, when she extracts it from him, he glimpses himself. Then he turns away." During their final exchange in the interrogation room, Gudsen stares at Michelle. "I know who I am," he declares. She meets his gaze, responding simply, "So do I." The shape of denial The closing montage delivers quiet devastation. Gudsen's ex-wife and son pack away photographs, including one showing a heavier, balder version of the man—a face both foreign and unmistakably his. In a single frame, the myth of the chiseled, commanding investigator collapses, revealing the ordinary figure he's spent years trying to erase. Over Thelma Houston's "Don't Leave Me This Way," the moment turns contemplative—Lehane's final musical choice, selected to underscore the magnetic pull between Michelle and Gudsen, two people unable to fully break free from each other. Whether he'll ever be convicted remains uncertain, the unanswered question hanging over the finale, which ends before a trial. Gudsen's fractured identity—swaggering machismo versus devoted family man—might suggest dissociative identity disorder, but Lehane resists reducing him to a clinical label. For him, Dave represents a broader cultural pathology. "I think of it the same way I think of all these performative males in our culture right now: macho dweebs hiding behind their keyboards," he explains. "If you saw them in person, you'd see some little 5'-6" guy who lives with his mom." Dave's psychology, Lehane argues, stems from denial, particularly regarding his desires and the transgressive aspects of his personal life. The writers explored how his relationships diverge from those of what Lehane calls a "healthy heterosexual American male," suggesting truths Dave cannot acknowledge. "We're all constructing these personas, and it's damaging the world," he observes. That critique carries personal weight. Like Egerton's character Jimmy Keene in Lehane's previous Apple TV+ series Black Bird, Gudsen functions as a cultural stand-in. Lehane was raised in what he describes as an "extremely masculine culture"; his immigrant father and uncles worked with their hands. But authenticity, not posturing, defined their masculinity. "My father had nothing but contempt for posing," Lehane recalls. "If my brothers got a weight set, he'd say, 'Why do you need to push a bar up and down? You can just do hard work.'" Lehane often considers how that generation would view today's performative masculinity. "I think he would be befuddled and appalled," he says. "A lot of the great-grandfathers and grandfathers of the men polluting our culture right now would be appalled." In that sense, Dave is his embodiment of "toxic masculinity,' a man whose identity rests on performance and concealment, whose carefully crafted armor masks profound emptiness. Living with the aftermath Lehane never set out to create a simple morality tale with clear heroes and villains. The ambiguity is deliberate, with Gudsen and Michelle shaped by their compromises, each capable of inflicting harm. Gudsen's intelligence and charm form part of his protective façade, a narrative he's repeated until it feels almost genuine. In his final moments, he approaches self-recognition before retreating, leaving both audience and characters suspended in uncertainty. Michelle, meanwhile, is steadied by duty and singed by guilt, hunting the truth even as the secret she carries could undo her. That deliberate inconclusiveness places Smoke alongside other works that resist easy answers. Lehane draws parallels to The Sopranos' contentious finale. "Whether you liked it or not, you're still talking about it," he notes. He's witnessed similar reactions to the conclusion of Shutter Island, the 2010 Martin Scorsese psychological thriller he wrote. "It's the question I get more than any other. I got it from my 16-year-old daughter yesterday. She said, 'Dad, my friends really want to know.' I was like, 'Honey, I'm not telling you.'" Dave and Michelle constructed identities around control and performance, and now both stand exposed: raw, unstable, unmoored. "What do they have in their lives, really, without each other?" Lehane asks. "They let their ids run so completely amok that there is no way to get half the horses back in the barn. So that is the big final dramatic question: Where are these people going to go now?"Smoke concludes without resolution, offering only consequence. The greatest damage isn't physical destruction but exposure itself: the compromises and deceptions that prove too painful to confront. What lingers isn't closure, but the mental heft of choices that cannot be undone—and the knowledge that carrying them is the only path forward.
Cosmopolitan
a day ago
- Cosmopolitan
'One of her best yet': Michelle Keegan leads gripping 'edge of your seat' thriller from Fool Me Once producers
We have been loving watching Michelle Keegan embrace the thriller side of her career, first as the lead in Harlan Coben's Fool Me Once, where she played a woman reeling from the death of her husband only to find him alive on a nanny cam. And now she's stepping into another thriller series, and this time - she's playing the detective. Keegan, is set to star alongside Douglas Booth in ITV's The Blame, a drama series that promises to be an "edge of your seat" thriller, as Keegan and Booth's police characters are called in to investigate the murder of a young girl. With ITV's head of drama Polly Hill, saying of the new series: 'The Blame is a brilliant new crime thriller full of surprising twists and a compelling investigation that also cleverly tackles police corruption, exploitation and misogyny as the thriller unravels. Megan is such a wonderful and clever writer, and with Michelle Keegan in the lead and Nicola Shindler at the helm, this is going to be an unmissable drama and one I'm very proud to have on ITV.' The series was just announced and already we can't wait for it to drop and so if you're just as curious as us, here's what to know about it. The Blame is a six-part ITV series, based on the novel of the same name by Charlotte Langley that will see Michelle Keegan star as DI Crane, who alongside her colleague DI Radley (Booth), will investigate the death of a young figure skater, Sophie Madsen, whose body is discovered and sends shock waves through the community. As they delve deeper into the mystery Crane discovers a web of lies and a deep level of corruption within her own team. The series is produced by Nicola Shindler and Richard Fee (who worked with Michelle on Fool Me Once), at for Quay Street Productions, who said, 'We are so delighted to be working with Megan [Gallagher, the series writer] again, she is an exceptional writer who has written a compelling series taking viewers on a twisty journey to discover what really happened through the lens of a contemporary police station brimming with secrets, corruption, and betrayal. "We are also thrilled at the brilliant cast led by Michelle and Douglas, who will keep viewers on the edge of their seats, wondering who to trust at a time when the themes explored in The Blame are more relevant than ever.' Leading the series will be Michelle Keegan as DI Emma Crane. Michelle is of course best known for her roles in Fool Me Once, Our Girl, Ten Pound Poms and Brassic. She'll be starring alongside Douglas Booth who is playing DI Tom Radley. Over the years Douglas has had prominent roles in projects such as LOL, Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations and The Sandman. Also joining the cast are: Unfortunately as the series has only just been announced and filming is beginning this summer in and around London, we could have quite a while to wait for the series to drop on ITV.
Newsweek
3 days ago
- Newsweek
Son Holds Mom's Hand—Makes Comment She May Never 'Emotionally Recover' From
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. A mom was left "speechless" by her 3-year-old son's simple yet significant observation while walking hand in hand. Michelle is a mom of three and school psychologist by trade, based in Orlando, Florida. More recently, she has taken a step back from her career to raise her kids, while continuing to work part-time as a travel agent. It is a decision that has brought her closer to her kids, including her son and middle child Chase, aged 4. "He's our sweet, insightful wild child, with boundless energy and a heart just as big," Michelle told Newsweek. It is also a decision that has afforded Michelle moments like the one that unfolded while heading home from a preview event for Universal's Epic Universe. "It had been a long, exhausting day, and we were slowly making our way back to the car," Michelle said. "Chase was holding my hand when he suddenly said, 'Mom, your hand is getting smaller.'" The remark prompted a moment of realization on Michelle's behalf: her son is already growing up fast. "It completely took the wind out of me," she said. "I was speechless. I choked out, 'Oh, Buddy, your hands are getting bigger.' He moved on as if nothing happened, totally unaware that he had just shattered my heart." Most parents would probably say it feels like their kids are growing up too quickly. A 2024 survey of 2,000 U.S. parents with children under the age of 18 revealed that 78 percent felt their kids were growing up too fast. Yet, until that moment, Michelle hadn't considered how things might change as Chase and her other two children got older. "I hadn't really thought much before that about the day he might not want to hold my hand," she said. "I've been deep in the trenches of motherhood. In the thick of it, you don't often think about the ending. You just move from one day to the next." In the span of just one sentence, Chase had prompted his mom to pause and think about how quickly time was moving along. "Somehow, he went from barely wrapping his tiny hand around my pinkie to holding my whole hand—and I don't even know when that happened," Michelle said. The feeling that realization left her with was profound, and one she felt compelled to share on social media, posting a video of herself on her Instagram, @travelwithmichellem, revealing how her son had made a comment she might never "emotionally recover" from. "I had absolutely no idea it would resonate with so many people," Michelle said. She hoped it might encourage others to seize the day and book those special vacations "because there will be a time when their children won't want to hold hands." "I think people connected with it because it's a different way of expressing how fast childhood goes," Michelle said. "We hear 'the days are long, but the years are short,' but this wasn't a quote or a cliché. It was an innocent thought from my 3-year-old that said it all. It felt both ordinary and profound." It was a moment Michelle will always remember; one that woke her up to the reality of her life and all the joy and significance of every single day. "You don't always realize you're living the 'good old days' until a tiny voice reminds you," she said.
