Smoke review – no TV show has ever been worth sticking with more

I never want to include spoilers, but sometimes they cannot be avoided. So, because I want you to stick with the new miniseries by Dennis Lehane, starring Taron Egerton (the pair reuniting after their great success with 2022’s Black Bird), and enjoy the myriad benefits it will reap, I urge you to ignore any misgivings you have about the first two episodes of Smoke. Most of them will fall away. The tonal inconsistencies, the apparent self-indulgence of Lehane with his protagonist’s hobby, the dabs of bad characterisation – just keep the faith. If you can’t, then Google the true crime podcast on which Smoke is based and work out what must be happening from there. I’m not giving you the title because you’ll be ruining a lot of fun for yourself.

It is not as though sticking with it will be too much of a hardship, even if you do have loads of questions. At its inception, Smoke is at the very least a solid police procedural. Egerton plays Dave Gudsen, a former firefighter who became an arson investigator after a traumatic callout put an end to his original career. When two serial arsonists start setting fires all over his patch and his searches for them stall, a detective from the local police department, Michelle Calderon (Jurnee Smollett), is brought in to help. She is in effect being punished for ending an affair with her captain (Rafe Spall) and is eager to catch the bad guys and restore her standing. Further complications to her private life include a mother in jail for an act first suggested by Calderon’s flashbacks to a terrifying experience in her childhood, then confirmed by her attendance at her mother’s parole hearing, in the face of deep hostility from her siblings.

We meet one of the main suspects long before she and Gudsen do. Freddy Fasano (a mesmerising performance by Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, which should see him clean up at awards time as thoroughly as Paul Walter Hauser did after Black Bird) is a cowed fry cook at a fast food outlet. Among other things, Lehane and Mwine make him a study in dreadful loneliness, whose ramifications spread like the fires set around the neighbourhood.

One of the arsonists uses the “divide and conquer” method – setting alight crisp aisles (So fatty! So flammable!) in supermarkets before starting bigger fires elsewhere so the emergency services are stretched thin. It suggests someone with a working knowledge of the department’s resources, so Gudsen and Calderon begin the long task of matching firefighters’ absence records with the days previous fires occurred and homing in on the possible perpetrator. Smoke becomes a cat and mouse game, with the opposing sides circling each other in ways that become increasingly extreme, but never quite tip over into preposterous.

It is hugely entertaining, though it is a shame that the main story slightly swamps Freddy’s and gives Mwine less to do as time goes on. But Egerton serves up an increasingly layered, clever performance as Gudsen, hitting every ball Lehane and the true story on which Smoke is based throw at him out of the park. It will certainly set him up for further and deserved success. Let’s hope it does the same for Mwine.

Hang in there, and enjoy.