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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.
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.”
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…
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