Smoke | APPLE TV+

Taron Egerton plays an arson investigator burning with ambition

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Egerton and Smollett.

DRAMA A police captain named Steven Burke (Rafe Spall), just one of the many unsavory characters in this sizzlingly strange new thriller, sums up nine episodes' worth of criminality with a terse sentence: “Bad people create stories to deny that they are in fact bad people.” He says this during what turns out to be an unhappy reunion with detective Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett), his ex-lover. Theirs wasn’t a pretty narrative. He left his wife for Calderone, but she coldly informed him he was moving too fast, and the affair was over. She threw water on the flames of their passion. In return he saw to it that she was humbled: She’s been demoted to working on an arson case with investigator Dave Gudsen (Black Bird’s Taron Egerton). For Michelle this has felt like swallowing hot coals—not only because she wants her career to be advancing, but because growing up she herself nearly died in a fire.