You want to know something that TV and movies never seems to do well?

Fire. It never looks good. Always fake. Whether its a network show we see every week or a dragon spitting it at us on cable, it looks wrong.

But “Smoke”, the Apple TV project that premiered this week gives us great looking fire that we haven’t seen done really well since “Back draft” which Ron Howard gave us 34 years ago.

And that wasn’t even really my favorite part of the pilot.

What I really enjoyed were the show’s two stars, Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollet. The former teetered on the edge of being overexposed for a bit, and the latter isn’t exposed enough. But they both show up for work here.

The plot centers around Egerton’s Dave Gudsen, an arson investigator (think Deniro in Backdraft) who wants to be an author, and Smollet’s Michelle Calderon, who also has a history with fire (think Baldwin in Backdraft) and a messy career with married superiors who have serious sway with her detective career. Together, they’re trying to track down two serial arsonists.

It’s all a lot of fun, and Kari Skogland, who directed the pilot, also manages to get some Fincher “Seven” vibes in there too, as Egerton and Smollet trade lines in a slightly playful but also contentious manner. The creative decision to make one of our arsonists a mystery and another an out in the open psychopath is also useful telling the story here.

Apple TV ain’t cheap. But I’ll hold on for the post “Severance” bump to see where “Smoke” can take us.

What did you think of the “Smoke” pilot? Let me know in the comments.