Smoke Review: The Year’s Most Unpredictable and Unsettling Show

Fire, that old Promethean gift, has always been humanity’s most volatile tool for both creation and erasure. In the fictional Pacific Northwest city of Umberland, the setting for the psychological drama Smoke, it is used exclusively for the latter.

The series, from the mind of crime novelist Dennis Lehane (a writer who has made a career mapping the dark tributaries of the human heart), presents a community held hostage by the seemingly random terror of two distinct serial arsonists. The resulting fear feels deeply contemporary, a mirror for the free-floating anxieties of an age where chaos often feels like the default state.

Into this maelstrom steps Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton), a former firefighter now serving as the lead arson investigator. His heroism seems less a public service and more a branding exercise, his charisma a carefully constructed facade for a bottomless need for validation. He is soon saddled with a new partner, Detective Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett), a fiercely capable investigator whose professional armor appears forged from past traumas and a deep-seated intolerance for performative nonsense.

Their immediate alliance is, to put it mildly, combustible. It’s less a partnership and more a slow-motion collision of two different, and equally dangerous, forms of personal combustion.

The Grammar of Arson

The series presents not one, but two distinct architectures of ruin, a dichotomy that speaks to different strains of societal despair. The first arsonist is a creature of grim routine, leaving milk jugs filled with accelerant on the porches of Trolley Town—a weapon born of suburban convenience and quiet, resentful rage. It is a terrifyingly quotidian form of violence, a working-class nihilism that turns the debris of daily life into an instrument of destruction.

The second fire-setter is an entirely different beast: a strategist, a systems-thinker whose crimes are exercises in logic. This perpetrator uses smaller, tactical fires as a feint to distract from a larger, more devastating blaze elsewhere. This is not just arson; it is logistical warfare waged with flame, a chillingly lucid form of anti-social engineering.

This duality extends to the show’s narrative structure, a procedural bifurcation that knowingly plays with genre convention. For the milk-jug arsonist, we are given a “howcatchem” from the outset. We know the culprit’s identity almost immediately, transforming the plot from a mystery of “who” to a more disturbing exploration of “why.” It is a slow walk into a disturbed mind.

The second, more elaborate case, however, remains a classic “whodunnit,” a puzzle box that weaponizes our suspicion and directs it at every character, including those ostensibly on the side of order. The tension, then, is not just about catching a criminal, but about the dawning horror that the call might be coming from inside the house.

Consequently, the pace of the investigation can feel deliberately erratic. The series will build a head of steam, hurtling forward with discoveries and infernos, only to slam on the brakes for long, quiet scenes of interpersonal drama. For viewers accustomed to the relentless momentum of standard network procedurals, this might feel like a flaw. But Lehane’s novelistic sensibilities are at work here; the pauses are not empty. They are filled with the smoldering anxieties and moral compromises of the characters, a recognition that the most significant fires are often the ones burning within.

The Hero and The Witness

At the series’ core are two competing infernos of the self. Dave Gudsen is a man seemingly built for the Instagram age, a walking embodiment of performative masculinity. His obsession with his own image is so profound that he is actively writing it into existence, drafting a novel of his exploits that reads less like art and more like a desperate act of self-hagiography. 

Taron Egerton maps this psychic decay with unnerving precision. He presents a man whose overconfidence is merely the brittle shell over a cavern of insecurity. The smile is the tell; it’s a high-wattage weapon that can curdle into a predator’s grimace without warning, a physical manifestation of a hero complex beginning to rot from the inside. He is a man coming undone.

If Gudsen is a study in hollow heroism, Detective Michelle Calderone is an exercise in professional containment. Jurnee Smollett portrays her not as an open wound, but as a carefully sutured one. Her professionalism is her shield, a defense mechanism forged in the fire of a childhood trauma and honed by the daily friction of a male-dominated precinct (complete with a messy entanglement with her superior that adds another layer of transactional complication).

Her past has gifted her a kind of sixth sense for the heat generated by a lie; she can smell a phony from a mile away, and her new partner sets off every alarm. Her suspicion compels her to run her own covert inquiry into the man standing next to her at every crime scene.

What begins with the familiar beats of a mismatched-partner procedural—the power struggles, the charged glances—quickly metastasizes into something far more interesting. Their relationship becomes a quiet, sustained interrogation disguised as teamwork. It is a duel of damaged souls, a psychological chess match where every shared piece of information is both a clue for the case and a test of the other’s integrity.

A Portrait of the Arsonist as an Invisible Man

If the show’s investigators represent the system’s flawed attempt to impose order, then Freddy Fasano is what happens when that system fails a person so completely they cease to exist within it. He is the ghost at the feast of American prosperity.

As portrayed by the remarkable Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Freddy is a fry cook entombed in a life of quotidian despair—a man so socially alienated he seems to vibrate on a different frequency from the rest of the world. He is a figure of both immense pity and profound menace, a walking embodiment of the adage that the most dangerous man is the one with nothing to lose.

He barely speaks. He doesn’t have to. Mwine’s achievement is to make this void riveting, conveying entire volumes of longing and resentment through the slump of his shoulders or a flicker in his otherwise vacant eyes.

The series attempts to dissect the “why” of his condition, presenting his pyromania as a primal form of communication. For a man who is invisible, fire is the ultimate tool of visibility. It cannot be ignored. It is a desperate, destructive grab for the power and recognition that society has denied him. The show gestures toward a backstory of neglect and social failure as the source code for this pathology, and while this is psychologically plausible, it feels somewhat…pat. It’s a shorthand for trauma that risks simplifying the character into a case study.

It is Mwine’s performance that rescues Freddy from the cliché of the “disaffected loner.” The script gives us a psychological sketch; the actor gives us a soul, however blackened it may be. He makes the character’s pain palpable, and in doing so, makes his actions not excusable, but terrifyingly understandable.

A Rogues’ Gallery of the Morally Flammable

No one in Smoke exists in a vacuum; they are all part of a moral ecosystem teetering on the verge of collapse, populated by figures who embody different flavors of compromise. Greg Kinnear’s Harvey Englehart is the decent, weary patriarch of this world, a fire department commander whose innate loyalty makes him willfully blind to the monster he may have nurtured.

Across the aisle, Rafe Spall’s Steven Burk is a more common type of institutional rot: the swaggering police captain whose affair with his subordinate, Michelle, reveals a man for whom power is just a tool for personal gratification.

Then, just as the show’s atmosphere threatens to become oppressively bleak, the narrative parachute-drops in two players who seem to have wandered in from a different, funnier series. The sudden appearance of John Leguizamo’s gleefully venal ex-cop and Anna Chlumsky’s hyper-literate, Ivy League ATF agent provides a jolt of chaotic energy. Their unlikely partnership is both a welcome relief and a source of tonal whiplash, a darkly comic sideshow that almost feels like a backdoor pilot for another story entirely. And that is precisely the point.

The series is relentless in its assertion that there are no clean hands here. From the main players down to the periphery, every character is nursing a secret, a sin, or a simmering resentment. This thematic consistency erodes any comfortable distinction between good and evil, forcing a recognition that the line between arsonist and investigator is not a firm border but a permeable membrane. It suggests the impulse to burn it all down is a far more universal condition than we care to admit.

The Unreliable Narrator Is the Show Itself

Visually, Smoke is pure prestige television, a baptism in beautiful, terrifying light. The cinematography is exquisite, particularly during the fire sequences, which are not mere spectacle but immersive, auteurist set-pieces. Here, the flame itself becomes the primary actor—a chaotic, mesmerizing force that dwarfs the human dramas playing out before it, rendering them fleeting and fragile. It is gorgeous.

The series then layers this visual elegance with the auditory grit of its protagonist’s literary efforts. Dave Gudsen’s voiceover, framed as excerpts from his nascent novel, is a masterclass in purple prose and dime-store philosophizing. While it offers a direct pipeline into his heroic solipsism, the device often feels too clever by half, a heavy-handed signpost pointing to character flaws we could already see.

This conflict between slick visuals and clumsy narration is a microcosm of the show’s entire project. It is a series in a perpetual state of identity crisis, swerving violently between a Fincher-esque psychological thriller, a Coen-brothers-style black comedy, and a grounded procedural.

The effect is one of profound disorientation, a narrative whiplash that feels deeply aligned with our fractured cultural moment. At times, the show seems to be actively working against itself, building tension only to puncture it with a moment of absurdity. That the series ends on a note of ambiguity, with several character arcs left unresolved, feels less like a failure of storytelling and more like a final, defiant statement. It presents a world, and a text, that refuses to resolve into a single, stable reality.

Smoke is a nine-episode American crime drama created by Dennis Lehane and inspired by the “Firebug” podcast about arsonist John Leonard Orr. It is set to premier globally on Apple TV+ on June 27, 2025, with new episodes released every Friday until August 15.

Full Credits

Director(s): Kari Skogland, Joe Chappelle, Jim McKay

Writers: Dennis Lehane, Adriane McCray, Molly Miller, Steven Hanna, Steve Harris

Producers and Executive Producers: Dennis Lehane, Taron Egerton, Richard Plepler, Bradley Thomas, Dan Friedkin, Kari Skogland, Joe Chappelle, Jane Bartelme, Marc Smerling, Kary Antholis

Cast: Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, Rafe Spall, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Greg Kinnear, John Leguizamo, Hannah Emily Anderson, Anna Chlumsky, Adina Porter, Dakota Daulby, Michael Buie

Composer: Thom Yorke (theme song “Dialing In”)