I’m sure I have, at some point, referred to Jurnee Smollett as a “fiery” actress. The Lovecraft Country and Friday Night Lights star does wild-eyed, fierce intensity in a way that is both captivating and reliable.

But this is getting a bit ridiculous.

Smollett got to stand just on the outside of the unconvincing climactic CGI fire in last year’s otherwise exceptional feature, The Order. Before that, she acted opposite burning crosses (Lovecraft Country) and torches (Underground). Now she gets full inferno immersion in Apple TV+‘s new limited series, Smoke, an extraordinarily well-acted, formally inconsistent adaptation of the podcast Firebug.

At nine episodes, the Dennis Lehane-created show is too long and frustratingly repetitive, but it unfurls a fascinating mystery, features one of the summer’s best ensemble casts and floats big ideas that don’t always come through cleanly in the execution.

Smollett plays Michelle Calderon, detective in a Pacific Northwest police force. Burnt (metaphorically, not literally) by a recently ended affair with her boss (Rafe Spall’s Steven Burk), and still burnt (emotionally, not literally) by a fire started by her mother when she was a kid, Michelle is assigned to partner with arson investigator Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton).

Dave, a former firefighter, needs the help, because there are two serial arsonists — called the Divide & Conquer arsonist and the Milk Jug arsonist — active in the city, and his kindly boss, Greg Kinnear‘s Harvey Englehart, is getting impatient. Getting slowly impatient, mind you, because the D&C arsonist has apparently already set 200+ fires and irritation is only beginning to set in.

Folks care a bit less about the Milk Jug arsonist, who has been preying on the city’s lower-income neighborhood, though we’re quickly introduced to a suspect: a sad-eyed, mumbly fast-food worker named Freddy (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine).

Kept busy with the two arsonists, the new partner and a precarious marriage to Hannah Emily Anderson’s Ashley, Dave does what any sensible person would do: He starts to write a book about an arson investigator with a new partner chasing a serial arsonist.

Soon, both Dave and Michelle’s obsessions escalate and games of cat-and-mouse ensue.

It’s a series packed with twists, including an initial reveal that’s really the whole premise of the podcast and series. Chances are pretty good that you’ll figure this twist out well before it’s formally unveiled, at least an episode later than might have been ideal. There’s a breathless later twist that isn’t exactly “guessable” and a key final twist that the series doesn’t execute in visual terms as well as it should. Yes, I’m being vague here, but the truth is that Smoke works not because it’s surprising, but because it’s pleasurable watching these characters’ respective wheels spin.

Due to the presence of Lehane, Egerton and Kinnear, Smoke is likely to be compared to 2022’s very solid limited series Black Bird, which won a well-deserved Emmy for Paul Walter Hauser.

The Apple TV+ show that Smoke ultimately has more in common with is Alfonso Cuaron’s Disclaimer, an exploration of what happens when we attempt to narrativize real life — and impose the binary of hero/villain onto complex human behavior — masquerading as a revenge drama. Smoke is all about definition and self-definition, which you’ll probably figure out from the choice to begin each episode with the definition of various not-difficult-to define words like “creativity,” which is “bringing something into existence; producing through imaginative skill.”

Michelle is being defined by outside factors, be it the criminal acts of her mother, the power of the man she’s sleeping with, or — because of various bigots in her own profession — her race and gender.

Dave doesn’t even have those elements to define him. His backstory is seemingly sad, but vague. His achievements at his job are negligible, his success in marriage is limited. But as he attempts to write himself as the hero of his own story, he sees a path to glory or possibly notoriety.

The hard-boiled narration from Dave’s book — “Fire doesn’t give a fuck about your wallet or the size of your gun or the size of the dick you wish was the size of your gun.” — steers a story that consciously keeps viewers aware that it’s… well… a story, at a fictional remove from a nonfiction podcast. Even its location is imaginary, an omnibus Pacific Northwest setting with Vancouver playing a state that’s amalgamated as “Orrington” on license plates and legal documents. “Orrington,” a not-so-subtle portmanteau, is one of those Everyplace/No Place settings in the vein of whatever-sunless-locale-Seven-takes-place-in. Like several key details of Dave’s character in particular, the location draws attention to the artificiality of the story being told, even as curious viewers can go online and find actual documentation of the podcast’s real-life basis.

The performances are split between naturalistic and attuned to heightened genre conventions.

Egerton, for reasons that will quickly be obvious, has the most complicated task, swinging from grounded and good-natured to edgier oddness that has an unsettling resemblance to vintage Christian Slater. Dave never quite projects as an “actual” person and this is a performance that could only work in a show with this sort of self-conscious approach. Here, it functions perfectly, especially opposite Smollett, who digs deep to find the pained center of a woman trying to reshape herself physically — especially in the first episode, she’s putting in a lot of workout time — and professionally.

Put Kinnear in the understated category, quietly heartbreaking as one of several men whose commitment to work has come at the expense of his ordinary humanity, while Spall aggressively swings between likably decent and repugnant, seemingly more for narrative than logical reasons. The cast gets a huge boost at midseason with the arrival of John Leguizamo, equally broadly funny and vulnerable as Dave’s disgraced former partner, and Anna Chlumsky, hilariously scornful as a law enforcement outsider who gets brought into the story’s chaos.

Special praise is due to Mwine, who may give the show’s best performance. There are aspects of Freddy’s character — a victim of the foster system with a variety of unspecified social difficulties — that feel right on the verge of several stereotypes. But Mwine conveys a lost, angry and fundamentally lonely man so hauntingly that I frequently wished that Lehane and company gave him more to do.

There are stretches, especially in the season’s second half, where Smoke starts directly stating and then repeating its themes in ways that both spoil at least one twist and often made me wonder if those underlined points had actually been illustrated or justified by the show. Those were the moments that suggest Smoke might have been improved with a six-episode season, or nine episodes with less redundancy and more room to delve into this fictional city’s economic inequalities and the challenges of modern firefighting.

It’s notable that even though I’m a resident of a Los Angeles still reeling from the city’s January fires, up until the finale very little in Smoke made me reflect on those fires. That’s further evidence of the show being at once real and yet insulated or isolated from reality. When you have a story this twisty, with dialogue as sturdy as Lehane tends to deliver and stars like the fiery Smollett, such limitations tend not to doom even an imperfect show.