Everywhere I look, I see and hear people complaining that there is Nothing On Right Now—which is to say, there’s no one TV show that has the larger cultural zeitgeist buzzing in quasi-monocultural unison. (Some of these comments have been specifically about the supposedly-fallen institution of HBO Sunday; I guess nobody cares about the tribulations of robber barons and Reconstruction Era housewives (and honestly, neither do I.))
Peak Streaming essentially obliterated the old TV model, in which pretty much any worthwhile series—from Emmy bait to King of Queens—aired new episodes between September and May and then took June-August off. Twenty years ago, your best option during the summer would be something like The Closer (which for a while was actually pretty good procedural junk food.) But these days? The penultimate season of Game of Thrones started in July; last year its tentpole spin-off House of the Dragon followed suit in June; Emmy juggernaut The Bear always comes through when the sun is out, et cetera.
Somehow—even with about a dozen streaming services at our disposal airing something like 500+ scripted TV series between them—summer 2025 is feeling more like summer 2005. I’m not sure what happened this year to leave the TV streets so barren. (There was a new season of The Bear, a show we all seem to be fatigued with, but that’s a column for another day perhaps.) But if you’re looking for something, anything to help you ride August out, AppleTV+ is, true to form, here to (sort of) save the day—with Smoke.
I can’t quite describe how I feel about most of AppleTV+’s product—it’s almost as if they’ve taken over Showtime’s old position as HBO’s photonegative, presenting series that look and feel “prestige” but ultimately taste like high-grade mid. The casts are starry but the execution is hacky. The shows run too long and wear out both their welcome and their premise, but somehow still draw you in through the gravity of good, junky melodrama. There are exceptions of course: Severance is as distinct a series as we’ve gotten in years, and earns its deafening buzz and Emmy nominations with an exacting eye for details both aesthetic and narrative, and The Morning Show is a singularly bizarre viewing experience I can’t recommend enough.
The AppleTV+ miniseries Smoke lands somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. It’s got crime novelist GOAT Dennis Lehane at the helm, the underrated Jurnee Smollett in a livewire co-lead performance, and a great hook: a tortured overzealous detective (Smollett) and a tortured arson investigator (Taron Egerton) chase two serial arsonists.
Who even writes crime stories about arsonists anymore? That’s ripe territory in and of itself right there. And yet, the first two episodes especially can feel so laughably clichéd that you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re watching an SNL digital short spoofing Zodiac. But I put Smoke on my everlong queue of things to keep an eye on weeks ago, after prolific TV critic Alan Sepinwall’s review promised a good twist that made the show worth sticking with. Three episodes in, he’s mostly right. Things are starting to get weird and out of control. Smollett is putting up a good performance despite weaving through every character trope in the Tough Female Cop handbook; she abuses her power so recklessly in the second episode that I can only imagine how much nuttier things will get before the finish line. Taron Egerton, meanwhile, is starting to settle into a nice groove of milquetoast-nice-guy-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder, building on the goodwill he accrued with last fall’s Carry-On. And while the identity of one of the fire-setting freaks is shrouded in whodunit mystery, the other guy is a vacant, dead-eyed fry cook with literally nothing else going in his life; it’s one of the more genuinely unsettling performances I’ve seen in awhile, courtesy of Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine.
All in all, Smoke feels more like Gillian Flynn than Lehane so far, with its Difficult Woman co-protagonist, whodunit shell, and sweaty, small-town weariness. The problem with Apple is that despite being on a weekly drop schedule, the audience always seems to be a step or two behind and most of the mass attention comes in the middle or near the end of its run. (Case in point: Joe Budden, an AppleTV+ series connoisseur, recommended the series on his most recent podcast episode last weekend.) If this were an HBO show, it would be a Mare of Easttown/Sharp Objects-esque mystery that we’d all rally around out of boredom at first and then become genuinely intrigued by.
With two episodes left to go, there’s still time for Smoke to become that kind of bandwagon—let’s just hope the story proves worthwhile. And if not, we’ll get another chance to cure summer boredom in two weeks when Noah Hawley remixes another beloved film franchise with Alien: Earth on the always-trustworthy FX. If that doesn’t stick then, well, there’s always Mad Men.
