Inspired by John Leonard Orr, the most prolific serial arsonist in history, the new crime drama series Smoke (available Fridays beginning June 27 on Apple TV+) follows a troubled detective (Jurnee Smollett) and an enigmatic arson investigator (Taron Egerton) in the Pacific Northwest as they pursue the trails of two serial arsonists. But there’s much more to it than arson. Created by Shutter Island and Mystic River author Dennis Lehane, the show is bound to have a myriad of twists and turns, as well as nuance.
“It’s really about the sexiness of self-destruction, and the form it takes is fire,” Lehane explains of the inspiration behind the new drama. “There’s what you do on the surface, and then there’s what drives it, which is rarely understood by the person. I like playing around with that. My whole life, I’d hear people say, ‘I want to be happy.’ And I’d be like, ‘Do you?’ It troubled me. People don’t want to be happy. It’s like the Talking Heads song about heaven. Nothing ever happens. Happy is a state of mind that lasts for all of about four minutes, and then you move on. I think what people really want to do is feel alive. So, we’re looking at that through a really twisted lens. Everybody on this show is addicted to feeling alive, and they’re doing so much destruction because of it.”
‘Twisted’ is a good word to describe the show. It gets dark, as you might expect from Lehane. There’s a bit of levity as well, though from an unexpected place: In the show, as in real life, the arsonist is actually trying to publish a book he wrote about his crimes.
“It was not published,” Lehane explains. “I think he self-published after he was arrested or convicted. I own it. It exists.”
Obviously the first question that comes to mind is: Was it good?
“No, it’s terrible. Absolutely terrible. I only read a few pages. I was just like, ‘Oh, this is just abysmal,'” Lehane answers. “But just the idea that he was running around selling this book that had in it details that only the actual arsonist of the actual crimes could know… I just thought it was just so wonderfully batsh*t that I said, ‘All right.’ That’s what brought me in.”
John Leguizamo, Greg Kinnear and Anna Chlumsky also costar.
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