8 hours ago
If You Enjoyed ‘Dept Q', Don't Sleep on New Prestige Crime Series ‘Smoke'
There's a lot of noise around the big blockbusters coming out right now – Fast cars! Dinosaurs! Jonathan Bailey's flip flops! – but while the cinemas are busy whipping themselves into a frenzy, a new prestige drama is quietly dropping onto television screens. As Netflix's recent Dept Q showed, a high-calibre, low-key crime thriller can scratch a different kind of itch, and if you've burned your way through that one, you're in luck: another superior offering is on its way.
Smoke, which consists of nine hour-long episodes, isn't set in dreary old Britain/Scotland, but takes place in dreary young America, in an unspecified state. It does, however, star several British actors, including a chisel-jawed Taron Egerton in the lead, who also executively produces the series. Egerton plays Dave Gudsen, an amiable and ominously named firefighter turned arson investigator who is wrestling with memories of the traumatic conflagration that ended his former career.
Dave is also getting flak (I stopped myself saying 'heat' – you're welcome) from his boss (an excellent Greg Kinnear) for failing to identify the two serial arsonists who are running rampant through the local area. One of them, 'The Divide and Conquer' arsonist, is setting off simultaneous fires in multiple public locations including supermarkets, so that the fire departments are stretched beyond capacity. The other, the 'Milkjug' guy, is burning down ordinary people's houses with cooking oil, though viewers are given more than a tip-off of who that might be with the introduction of downtrodden fry cook Freddy (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine).
Dave, however, is having minimal success tracking down either culprit – in fact, he seems rather distracted by his own literary ambitions, as he's got a schlocky fictionalised memoir on the go – and the situation is raging out of control. The corporation that owns the supermarkets isn't happy and is threatening to take action against the whole department; that, if not people's houses burning down, might be what's needed to light a firecracker up Dave's... (sorry but it's so hard!).
What does Dave need? Why, a partner of course! And preferably one towards whom he can feel mild animosity, if not outright contempt. Enter Michelle Calderon (another conspicuous name, from the Spanish for 'cauldron'), played by the impressively self-contained Jurnee Smollett, a detective from a different police force who has been assigned to assist Dave for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Michelle has secrets, including a toxic affair with her former boss (another Brit, Rafe Spall) and some fire-related trauma from her earlier life. She's doing her best to block it out – mostly by exercise – but the past, as we know, doesn't like to stay buried.
Of course these elements are all familiar, some might say hackneyed, tropes of the crime genre, but what elevates Smoke – which is based on the true-crime podcast Firebug – is the quality of its cast and, thanks to writer Dennis Lehane (Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island), who created and wrote the series, its big-swinging script. '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,' narrates Egerton, presumably quoting from the book Dave's writing in giant letters in his notepad (maybe it's not so bad after all!). It's punchy stuff.
Smoke looks great too – all desaturated compositions of sickly grey-greens, with the striking billows of pale yellow when a fire is burning white-hot. And fire really is staggering beautiful, as much as it is terrifying and obliterating and all the other things that get writer-mode Dave so hot under the collar. It's certainly a change to have a drama that focuses on ash dispersal rather than blood spatter. (For a bit of bonus cred, the title track, over elegant sequences of smouldering pages, is performed by Radiohead's Thom Yorke.)
That said, there are no dinosaurs, or F1 cars, or flip-flops. But Smoke does have tension, and great performances, and slow-burn simmer. Also, if you stick with it, the promise of some serious twists (and John Leguziamo!) to come.
'Smoke' is now streaming on Apple TV+ with new episodes every Friday
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