The South Pasadena, Calif., hardware store thrummed with the usual rhythms of a Wednesday night: customers browsing shelves, cash registers chiming, the low hum of fluorescent lights overhead. Lurking in one of the aisles, a man quietly slipped an incendiary device, made from a cigarette, matches, and paper, into a section displaying foam rubber, with practiced ease. Fire roared to life minutes later, engulfing the store in a furnace of rising panic and confusion.
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The blaze at Ole’s Home Center on Oct. 10, 1984, which killed four people, was one of nearly 2,000 suspicious fires across Southern California throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Craft shops, department stores, and discount retailers struck by the arsonist all bore the same eerie signature: delayed ignition, maximum destruction, and a clean escape. Investigators were left grasping at smoke, trying to make sense of a pattern that felt deliberate but remained elusive.
This true story, chronicled in the 2021 podcast Firebug, became the basis for Apple TV+’s new nine-episode crime drama Smoke, starring Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, Greg Kinnear, Anna Chlumsky, and John Leguizamo, and debuting June 27. But it’s no procedural retelling. It’s a feverish descent into moral ambiguity, where duty and delusion, heroism and harm, become blurred in the heat of the blaze.
“What really drives my engine is always the human psyche,” Smoke creator, executive producer, and writer Dennis Lehane tells TIME. What captivated him wasn’t the forensic detail of the fires, but the “whacked out” emotional terrain that surrounded them. “That’s what I was locking on.”
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Unraveling a mystery
Lehane, whose literary canon includes the novels-turned-movie hits Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River, is no stranger to the fault lines of morality. When he first listened to Firebug, he wasn’t immediately convinced it was a story he wanted to find his own way into. But the psychological undertones tugged at him. “I really think this is about people who are turned on by the things that can kill them,” he explains.
He approached Smoke not as a mystery to be solved, but as a dark drama where guilt, ego, and self-deception flicker and flare. A key decision was to set the story in the present day rather than tether it to the ‘80s and ’90s, where its real-life roots lie. That shift allows the series to examine contemporary notions of trust, institutional failure, and existential unease.
The show also marks a reunion between Lehane and Taron Egerton, who previously worked together on the 2022 Apple TV+ series Black Bird. In Smoke, Egerton stars as Dave Gudsen, an arson investigator in Umberland, a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest, whose life starts to buckle under the strain of a difficult case and a fragile home life. He’s soon paired with Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett), a sharp detective recently transferred from the metro police’s robbery division. Because Michelle doesn’t share the insular loyalties of the local department, her clear-eyed perspective proves essential as they track a pair of serial arsonists; she sees things the others don’t.
As the investigation intensifies, suspicion creeps closer to home. The evidence suggests one of the arsonists may have ties to the profession—perhaps a firefighter or someone from within the department itself—forcing Dave to consider the disturbing possibility that he may be pursuing a colleague, or worse, a friend.
From the start, Smoke struck a chord with Egerton, who also serves as an executive producer. “It felt like something that would be a stretch and a challenge,” he recalls. What intrigued him most was the contradiction at the heart of his character. Dave, he explains, is a man with a “slightly self-aggrandizing image of himself” as a hero—yet his private life “doesn’t totally line up with that.” He’s someone who regularly tests people’s boundaries.
To capture that duality, Egerton created a moral framework for Dave that doesn’t necessarily align with conventional standards. “He’s the guy who has it all figured out and knows exactly what’s right and wrong and knows what’s for the best of everybody in there,” says Egerton, adding, “I had to get under the skin of who he is and figure out what that very specific brand of morality is: What is OK for him and what’s not, and also does that code of ethics apply when nobody’s looking?”
The actor’s experiences mirrored his character’s unease. Lehane recalls Egerton wrestling early on with how to portray the complexity of Dave. “Those first two episodes he was in actor hell, I would argue,” recalls Lehane.
But after their work together on Black Bird, Lehane already knew Egerton had the ability (and willingness) to push himself into emotionally raw places. “When you find an actor who has the range to do anything you want to do, you hold onto that person, particularly if they’re not just gifted, but as good a human being as Taron,” he explains. That discomfort ultimately served the role, lending Dave a raw, destabilized energy that captures a man struggling to hold his life together.
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A careful study of obsession
The real story that inspired Smoke was even darker. By the late ‘80s, Southern California was in the grip of a firestorm—a wave of suspicious blazes that erupted with chilling regularity. They began quietly: a spark near a bolt of fabric, a flare in the foam rubber aisle, as at Ole’s. But within minutes, these small signs gave way to catastrophe. Entire structures were gutted. First responders often arrived to find buildings fully engulfed, too late to save what was inside.
As the fires spread, so did the sense that this was no coincidence. The ignition method was strikingly consistent: a crude yet effective time-delay mechanism, fashioned from everyday items like cigarettes, matches, and pieces of lined yellow notebook paper. The targets were just as deliberate: retail chains, mom-and-pop shops, and warehouse-style stores, all easy to access, lightly monitored, and filled with highly flammable merchandise.
Over time, law enforcement homed in on John Orr, a former fire captain whose fingerprint was found on a partially unburned incendiary device. A federal jury convicted him in 1992 on three counts of arson, sentencing him to 30 years in prison. The following year, he admitted to setting three more fires. In 1998, Orr was tried again at the state level on 21 additional counts of arson and four counts of first-degree murder for the victims of the 1984 blaze at Ole’s Home Center in South Pasadena, Calif. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The story didn’t end with Orr’s conviction. His disturbing legacy drew the attention of filmmaker and former HBO executive Kary Antholis, who had followed the case for decades. He was just as interested in the psychology behind the crimes as he was in the procedural details—not just how the fires were set, but why. His investigation became the foundation for Firebug, the podcast he created with Emmy-winning producer Marc Smerling.
Through exhaustive research and a series of taped interviews with Orr and those who knew him, Antholis assembled a chilling portrait of a man who spent years crafting his identity through fire and fiction. One of the most revealing discoveries by law enforcement was a manuscript entitled Points of Origin, a novel Orr wrote with moments mirroring the real-life fires with uncanny specificity. “He was doing this [lighting fires] for a very long time, so I think he wanted to take a bow for it,” Smerling explains.
The result was more than a true-crime chronicle. Firebug became a slow-burning study of the seductive power of control. “Orr had a strangely twisted ego that drove him to do these things,” Smerling continues. “He had incredible feelings of powerlessness. This was his way to foster power.”
Moving from ambience to ‘action’
Although Smoke takes creative liberties by reimagining characters, relationships, and story arcs, Lehane built a show that trades sensationalism for something more unsettling—a meditation on identity, obsession, and unraveling. Every episode opens with a visual and sonic elegy: a title sequence created by the studio Digital Kitchen, depicting objects consumed by flame and underscored by a new song from Thom Yorke called “Dialing In.” Yorke’s slow track twinkles with dread, setting the emotional temperature for what’s to come.
That precise tone—moody, dark, charged—was carefully calibrated. Kari Skogland, who directed The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and The Loudest Voice, oversaw the show’s first two episodes. Lehane chose Skogland partly for her ability to draw subtle, nuanced performances from actors. “I would be like, I want you to pull that from the actress,” says Lehane, adding, “But I don’t want it to be obvious. I want it to be on a second viewing that viewers catch it.”
In a medium increasingly reliant on digital wizardry, Smoke leans into practical effects when possible. “The fire in Event Horizon is spectacular,” says Lehane, also citing the visceral realism of films like Backdraft and Only the Brave. “Right from the beginning, I said to my team, this is what I want it to look like. I don’t want to endanger anybody, but we have to find a way to do practical fire.”
To bring that vision to life, the production team constructed a sprawling “burn stage” in Vancouver, where fires could be safely set and controlled. In addition to using fire-resistant materials and having safety-focused crew on set, members of the city’s fire department were stationed close by during filming. This wasn’t just technical bravado, but a commitment to realism. The fire had to feel alive, volatile, and credible—a force the actors had to confront in real time.
The opening scene in Smoke’s pilot episode showcases one of the series’ more complex and technically demanding moments. In the scene, Egerton’s character navigates a hoarder’s house overtaken by flames. Achieving the effect required precise teamwork—all while the actor navigated the growing inferno. “Taron, God bless him, man,” Lehane says. “There are no special effects in that scene. That’s just Taron on the burn stage with pipes all around him shooting actual fire.”
Egerton, for his part, welcomed the production’s commitment to realism. “I think we all feel a little bit of fatigue when things are heavily reliant on computer generated imagery. There’s a real value in storytelling to things that feel tangible and practical,” says the actor. “It was obviously a challenging sequence to do, but things that are worth something are normally hard won. It really does have a kind of magic to it.”
What tragedy leaves behind
In Smoke, fire isn’t just a destructive force, it’s the show’s emotional grammar: how guilt simmers, how ego combusts, how lies catch and burn.
The series draws its fear and unease from a chilling idea: the sense that dangerous people often hide in plain sight. “We just miss them. We don't see them, because we're not looking very hard on a psychological level,” Smerling says. “You have to understand people at a deeper level than the surface.”
It’s a notion that resonates deeply with Egerton, who sees the world of Smoke as a dreamscape of moral distortion. “It resembles our world, but it’s also a kind of slightly darker, heightened version of it,” he explains. As the episodes unfold, the narrative mutates, and what begins as a crime story bends into something more abstract, more interior. “It really shifts, changes, and distorts over time,” he says. “It becomes something much more psychological and weird.”
For Lehane, the truest devastation lies not in what the fire takes, but in what it reveals. The show’s most haunting moments are its most intimate: the quiet reckonings, long-deferred truths, characters unable (or unwilling) to look themselves in the mirror. “I hope it leads people to question a lot of these paths they’re going down,” says Lehane, adding, “I wish we could all just admit, ‘Hey, we’re all messed up—every single one of us.’ And if you’re not, you’re lying to yourself and to everybody else. So just strive to be a little better every day.”
That is the core of Smoke. Beneath the fire and ash, beyond the secrets and suspense, it asks the simple, difficult question: What does it cost to live in denial? “Every single person in the show lies to themselves, and it only leads to grief,” Lehane continues. “There’s not a single person, with the exception of [one], who’s honest with themselves—and look how much pain is caused by that.”