What to stream this week: Taron Egerton's fiery thriller and five more shows to catch
This week's picks include an arson thriller, an investigation of the OceanGate submersible disaster, season two of British crime drama The Gold and a revisit of Hannibal Lector.
Smoke ★★★★ (Apple TV+)
Few movie stars have come to streaming with more subversive purpose than Taron Egerton. The British actor, empowered by the Kingsman action-comedies and the Elton John biopic Rocketman, has used the 2022 Apple TV+ crime drama Black Bird and now this twisty, unconventional investigative thriller to play flawed men who want to believe they're the hero of their story.
Egerton has become the great pretender of leading men, undercutting viewer expectations – especially here – and serving as a skeleton key for harsh revelations.
The story of a hunt for a pair of serial arsonists in America's Pacific Northwest, Smoke starts giving off uneasy but intriguing vibes within the first episode. The dynamic between arson investigator Dave Gudsen (Egerton) and his new partner, police detective Michelle Calderon (Jurnee Smollett) is askew.
The familiar, hard-nosed procedural stances feel forced – he's playing some kind of self-ordained role, she's carrying too much trauma. Dave and Michelle tell themselves truths that the story casts doubt on. And they don't trust each other.
Like Black Bird, Smoke was created by the American crime novelist Dennis Lehane, whose books have become Clint Eastwood's Mystic River and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.
Lehane isn't doubling down on the grim realities, he's looking at them anew. Early on, Dave explains arsonists often act from a place of powerlessness, and the show digs into how that creates a hidden fury that must be satisfied. The story gives time, and explanatory scenes, not just to cops but also criminals.
The nine-part series stages several fires, whether as an apocalyptic conflagration or a sudden nightmare that leaves skin literally peeling off a victim, but flames are seen as a kind of abyss. There's nothing there. It's interested in the people drawn to the abyss.
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The tone is always sharp, the stakes genuine, but the mechanics hint at the absurd. Dave, who is writing a novel about an arson investigator, imagines himself playing the tough guy hero in his everyday life, and you see this. Delusions can become dominant.
It's as if Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, circa Adaptation, have snuck into the writers' room. Smoke suggests that wrenching outcomes can have absurd seeds, and then it contrasts that with brutal bursts of corrupted reality. The show has hints of brilliance that can only appear with an idiosyncratic mindset, but it's also smart enough to staff the supporting cast with impressive actors, including Rafe Spall and Greg Kinnear, who can catch you out. Every episode from the second onwards ends with an unforeseen turn. That should be valued. From June 27.
Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster ★★★★ (Netflix)
Sadly, but not unexpectedly, the explicit causes and systemic failings that led to the June 2023 implosion of the tourist submersible Titan, killing all five people on board during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, are familiar and predictable: OceanGate co-founder and CEO, Stockton Rush, who was piloting the undersea vehicle, was a narcissist who disdained safety regulations. He believed, like the Titanic, that the Titan was 'invulnerable'. The immense pressure at 3000 metres depth in the Atlantic Ocean proved otherwise.
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What this feature-length documentary from director Mark Monroe provides is a level of detail and testimony that is damning. The narrative's thoroughness stands in contrast to Rush, who was obsessed with using an experimental carbon fibre hull to mark himself as a visionary. Rush had Bezos envy. He wanted to be acclaimed as a pioneer and brought start-up shortcuts to a technically demanding industry.
Cutting between former employees, including one who was fired within 24 hours for raising serious safety concerns, and official investigators, the documentary makes clear it was only a matter of time before the hull of the Titan gave way.
Monroe is circumspect with the four paying passengers, who lost their lives to Rush's hubris, but there's no deference to the latest instance of the CEO psychopath. 'He wanted fame,' a former staffer notes. 'And he's got it.'
The Gold (season 2) ★★★½ (Stan)
The first season of this British crime drama, which uses the real-life robbery in 1983 of a fortune in gold bullion as the starting point for an incisive and deeply entertaining take on ambition and order, was one of 2023's best shows. Creator Neil Forsyth returns for the new instalment, but it takes an episode or two to acquire a genuine rhythm, while the plot requires a lot more speculation. Nonetheless, with Hugh Bonneville exemplary as the chief investigator, there's still a muscular desperation and some mighty monologues.
Mr Loverman ★★★½ (Binge and Foxtel)
British actor Lennie James (Line of Duty) rightfully won the best actor category at the recent British Academy Television Awards for his portrayal of Barrington 'Barry' Walker, a London charmer of Antiguan birth whose ebullient life spans dual marriages: officially to his wife Carmel (Sharon D Clarke), and unofficially to his boyhood friend and soul mate, Morris De La Roux (Ariyon Bakare).
This painfully nuanced series, adapted from Bernardine Evaristo's novel of the same name, captures Barry's belated attempt to finally deal with his deception after a lifetime of cultural exclusion and unacknowledged selfishness.
Call Her Alex ★★½ (Disney+)
This two-part documentary, directed by filmmaker Ry Russo-Young (Before I Fall), offers powerhouse podcaster Alex Cooper, who has taken Call Her Daddy from raunchy confession to chart-topping celebrity hub, the ultimate 21st century media compliment: an authorised portrait that celebrates her ascendance to mogul status. Framed around a live tour, Call Her Alex finds plenty to recount from Cooper's narrative, including a university sports career marked by sexual harassment and business difficulties when Call Her Daddy blew up, but it doesn't want to ask questions about who she is now, even as adulation furthers her ambition.
Hannibal ★★★★ (Binge, Foxtel and Stan)
Rewatch alert. It's 10 years since the third and final season of Bryan Fuller's exquisitely twisted reappraisal of author Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs characters concluded. Few shows since have come close to matching its vivid mix of baroque tableaus and psychological horror. With Hugh Dancy as FBI profiler Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen as then leading psychiatrist (and surreptitious serial killer) Hannibal Lecter, this is a truly twisted take on the buddy (bloody) cop procedural. It's a show about empathy's cost and the need for transformation, told with an ambition that would worry today's streaming giants.
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