Apple's New Show Tells the Wild Story of a Real-Life Serial Arsonist. It's Completely Fascinating.

This article contains spoilers for Episode 3 of Smoke .

Smoke, Apple TV+'s new crime drama miniseries starring Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollett, begins like so many other procedurals, with a generically handsome young hero and his new tough-girl partner hunting for a pair of elusive perps. The voiceover narration that opens the first episode—while scenes from arson investigator Dave Gudsen's (Egerton) nightmares about a particularly dangerous house fire boil on the screen—describes how fearsome and chaotic fire is, but it doesn't quite make the impression it should. There's a reason why relatively little crime fiction is about Arson, a sneaky, cowardly act usually driven by Petty financial concerns. Fire is magnificent, but arsonists are not. Even the clues sought by Dave and Michelle (Smollett), the police detective assigned to help him find the two arsonists plaguing the fictional Pacific Northwest city of Umberland, are boringly technical: burn patterns, sooty coins, and scraps of cigarettes. But Smoke is really a volatile character drama fronting as an anodyne procedural. Its creator, the crime novelist Dennis Lehane, has no intention of cranking out the arson version of CSI. That first episode, which premiered on June 27, gives few hints of the madness to come, so viewers looking for something less basic should stick around until the end of Episode 2.

All-American Dave has a lovely librarian wife (Hannah Emily Anderson) who worries about him (“Hey, they bring me in after the fire now,” he assures her), and a teenage stepson (Luke Roessler) with whom he struggles to connect. Michelle, a former Marine played with impeccable swagger by Smollett, has a troubled past and has been sleeping with her boss (Rafe Spall), who just left his wife for her, a development she doesn't particularly welcome. When she breaks up with him, he sends her off to work with the fire department on the serial arsonists, a backwater assignment. She has to pull off a big solution to get back in the major leagues. Dave bristles at the suggestion that his investigation needs help, but eventually they strike up a bro-ish rapport, swapping war stories and jokey insults while he shows her the ropes.

Only in Episode 2 do we start to see that all may not be quite right with Dave. He's writing a book, a novel about a preposterous idealized arson investigator based on his own experiences in the field. “Maybe a few female characters?” his wife gently suggests. When he looks away, she turns back to the manuscript with a grim sigh. As the series progresses, the passages from the book—Dave dictates them into his phone—get hilariously worse, especially after he introduces the requested female character, based on Michelle, as a love interest. Somehow, Dave's reactions are always a bit off. When his wife and stepson learn that the boy's father plans to move 2,000 miles away, Dave can't even grasp why they're so upset. “So he’ll be living with us full time?” is the first thing he asks. “Wife of cop” is a thankless character in crime fiction. Such women are always pushing the protagonist to be more domestic—that is, to do less of what the reader or viewer wants to see him do. But Dave's wife, Ashley, doesn't seem sure she likes having him around, and her son is pretty clear in his mistrust. What's wrong with them? Dave is a cheerful presence, a committed public servant with a winning smile, doing the best he can. Or is he? “Nobody knows Dave,” the kid advises Michelle.

For her part, Michelle cuts legal corners and fakes evidence to justify searching the property of one of the pair's prime suspects, a guy who turns out not being their guy—though, conveniently, guilty of plenty of other crimes. her disastrous love life, the detective stresses out about her mother, a former drug addict who is currently imprisoned for setting a fire that nearly killed 12-year-old Michelle, but is soon coming up for parole. “I'm never going to be a well-rounded person,” Michelle says in the obligatory therapist's-office scene. “I’m the job.” Dave is a shrewd investigator, but Michelle is superhumanly dogged. While he brilliantly follows a trail of clues to one of the arsonists—a lonely, damaged, middle-aged chicken-shack cook named Freddy, played with almost unbearable poignancy by Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine—Michelle comes to suspect, correctly, that the other arsonist, the one who specializes in setting fire to supermarket racks of potato chips, could very well be Dave himself.

Smoke isn't a mystery. It's clear from very close to the start who the culprits are. The series is based on the podcast Firebug , the story of John Leonard Orr, a California arson investigator who is also considered to be the most prolific arsonist in the nation's history, fond of potato chips as an accelerant, and author of a dreadful novel. Instead of a whodunit, Smoke becomes a portrait of poisonously thwarted longing. It all pivots around Egerton's Dave, a storyteller who stages flashy presentations at arson-investigator conferences and passionately sings along with power ballads in the car, but whose performance of normal human interaction rings just false enough to make the people in his life increasingly uneasy. That smile, so boyishly appealing in the series' first episode, will ultimately become terrifying, the crack in a mask about to drop from a not entirely human face.