A fire investigator (Taron Egerton) is reluctantly paired with a police detective (Jurnee Smollett) to work the cases of two separate serial arsonists in the Apple TV+ crime thriller “Smoke.” One of the culprits won’t be a mystery to anyone familiar with the podcast “Firebug,” from which the nine-episode series draws fictionalized inspiration.

That’s not a spoiler; “Firebug” is cited in the opening credits. A true crime podcast about a real arsonist who was eventually caught, someone a lot like the person at the center of the podcast forms the basis for one of the characters here. The reveal is meant to be a twist (though it is heavily telegraphed) and it comes at the show’s midway point, when we already know the identity of the other arsonist, because he might as well be followed around by a blinking arrow pointing to him. So the question becomes: Will the show’s characters figure out what we already know, and will that process be interesting? Or will it drag on, filling time?

Most streaming shows suffer from “shoulda been a movie” syndrome, so you can probably guess the answer. But “Smoke” doesn’t have enough meat on its bones even for that. Created by Dennis Lehane (best known as the author of novels such as “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby, Gone”), the series seems to have aspirations of Scorsese, but plays like an unintentional parody, working hard to capture “gritty” instead of just being gritty. Vibes abound, but they aren’t effective without a solidly constructed narrative.

Sometimes people set buildings on fire for the insurance payout. Sometimes they are driven by other reasons, and “Smoke” offers a paper-thin psychological study: Arsonists commit their crimes because they are filled with feelings of inadequacy, neglect and alienation, and this is how they regain a measure of power.

Two arsonists have been targeting a rainy, nondescript town and they’ve managed to elude the best efforts of Dave Gudsen (Egerton). His investigative know-how is supposedly legendary, but the arsons remain unsolved and there are new fires that keep following the same patterns. So he’s paired with Det. Michelle Calderon (Smollett), who is there to help narrow down the suspects.

He’s an ex-firefighter haunted by dreams of being trapped in an inferno. Married with a teenage stepson, he’s turned his real-life work experience into fodder for a novel. Great stuff, he thinks to himself! Outwardly, he is the picture of competence and regular guy-ness. Privately, he is both wildly overconfident and deeply insecure.

She’s an ex-Marine with a tough exterior. She’s only been a cop for a few years, and this new assignment does not seem good for her career, but someone in the police department has shuffled her off to arson investigations, likely due to her history of bad decisions, including an affair with a toxic coworker who is also her boss.

They are both outrunning demons, but otherwise, they are like oil and vinegar. Dave drops F-bombs liberally, but is the kind of person who flashes a big smile to massage a situation. Michelle has a chip on her shoulder and takes more of a dogged, sledgehammer approach.

Tonally, the show is all over the place, laying on the moody theatrics one moment, mocking Dave’s writerly pretenses the next. Greg Kinnear plays Dave’s worn-out boss, with John Leguizamo as the dirtbag ex-cop who was Dave’s partner before Michelle came along, and Anna Chlumsky is an investigator who joins the team late in the game. Everyone is compromised and not particularly good at their jobs, but the characters are too flat to register as meaningful. Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine especially is too good an actor to be stuck in the role of a troubled, slack-jawed man who might have developmental disabilities, but is rendered as an awkward person who has been treated poorly all his life and has finally been pushed over the edge. Only Smollett really shines.

The show is pulpy without being entertaining, with a ludicrous showdown in the finale that’s followed a few scenes later by another, even more ludicrous staredown. Plenty of smoke. No fire.

“Smoke” — 1.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

By KIM CHANDLER, CLAIRE RUSH and ELLIOT SPAGAT

Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian lived in the United States for 47 years, married a U.S. citizen and raised their daughter. She was gardening in the yard of her New Orleans home when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers handcuffed and took her away, her family said.

Related Articles

Supreme Court throws out appellate rulings in favor of transgender people in 4 states

National pride is declining in America. And it’s splitting by party lines, new polling shows

Trump administration finds Harvard failed to protect Jewish students, threatens to cut all funding

EPA employees put names to ‘declaration of dissent’ over agency moves under Trump

Supreme Court takes up a Republican appeal to end limits on party spending in federal elections

Kashanian arrived in 1978 on a student visa and applied for asylum, fearing retaliation for her father’s support of the U.S.-backed shah. She lost her bid, but she was allowied to remain with her husband and child if she checked in regularly with immigration officials, her husband and daughter said. She complied, once checking in from South Carolina during Hurricane Katrina. She is now being held at an immigration detention center in Basile, Louisiana, while her family tries to get information.

Other Iranians are also getting arrested by immigration authorities after decades in the United States. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security won’t say how many people they’ve arrested, but U.S. military strikes on Iran have fueled fears that there is more to come.

“Some level of vigilance, of course, makes sense, but what it seems like ICE has done is basically give out an order to round up as many Iranians as you can, whether or not they’re linked to any threat and then arrest them and deport them, which is very concerning,” said Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group.

Homeland Security did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on Kashanian’s case but have been touting arrests of Iranians. The department announced the arrests of at least 11 Iranians on immigration violations during the weekend of the U.S. missile strikes. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said, without elaborating, that it arrested seven Iranians at a Los Angeles-area address that “has been repeatedly used to harbor illegal entrants linked to terrorism.”

The department “has been full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and violent extremists that illegally entered this country, came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs or otherwise,” spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said of the 11 arrests. She didn’t offer any evidence of terrorist or extremist ties. Her comment on parole programs referred to President Joe Biden’s expanded legal pathways to entry, which his successor, Donald Trump, shut down.

Russell Milne, Kashanian’s husband, said his wife is not a threat. Her appeal for asylum was complicated because of “events in her early life,” he explained. A court found an earlier marriage of hers to be fraudulent.

But over four decades, Kashanian, 64, built a life in Louisiana. The couple met when she was bartending as a student in the late 1980s. They married and had a daughter. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, filmed Persian cooking tutorials on YouTube and was a grandmother figure to the children next door.

The fear of deportation always hung over the family, Milne said, but he said his wife did everything that was being asked of her.

“She’s meeting her obligations,” Milne said. “She’s retirement age. She’s not a threat. Who picks up a grandmother?”

While Iranians have been crossing the border illegally for years, especially since 2021, they have faced little risk of being deported to their home countries due to severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. That seems to no longer be the case.

The Trump administration has deported hundreds of people, including Iranians, to countries other than their own in an attempt to circumvent diplomatic hurdles with governments that won’t take their people back. During Trump’s second term, countries including El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama have taken back noncitizens from the U.S.

The administration has asked the Supreme Court to clear the way for several deportations to South Sudan, a war-ravaged country with which it has no ties, after the justices allowed deportations to countries other than those noncitizens came from.

The U.S. Border Patrol arrested Iranians 1,700 times at the Mexican border from October 2021 through November 2024, according to the most recent public data available. The Homeland Security Department reported that about 600 Iranians overstayed visas as business or exchange visitors, tourists and students in the 12-month period through September 2023, the most recent data reports.

Iran was one of 12 countries subject to a U.S. travel ban that took effect this month. Some fear ICE’s growing deportation arrests will be another blow.

In Oregon, an Iranian man was detained by immigration agents this past week while driving to the gym. He was picked up roughly two weeks before he was scheduled for a check-in at ICE offices in Portland, according to court documents filed by his attorney, Michael Purcell.

The man, identified in court filings as S.F., has lived in the U.S. for over 20 years, and his wife and two children are U.S. citizens.

S.F. applied for asylum in the U.S. in the early 2000s, but his application was denied in 2002. His appeal failed but the government did not deport him and he continued to live in the country for decades, according to court documents.

Due to “changed conditions” in Iran, S.F. would face “a vastly increased danger of persecution” if he were to be deported, Purcell wrote in his petition. “These circumstances relate to the recent bombing by the United States of Iranian nuclear facilities, thus creating a de facto state of war between the United States and Iran.”

S.F.’s long residency in the U.S., his conversion to Christianity and the fact that his wife and children are U.S. citizens “sharply increase the possibility of his imprisonment in Iran, or torture or execution,” he said.

Similarly, Kashanian’s daughter said she is worried what will happen to her mother.

“She tried to do everything right,” Kaitlynn Milne said.

By JOSEPH WILSON and EDITH M. LEDERER

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Many of the world’s nations, but not the United States, gathered Monday in Spain to tackle the growing gap between rich and poor nations and try to drum up trillions of dollars needed to close it.

“Financing is the engine of development. And right now, this engine is sputtering,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his opening comments at the four-day Financing for Development meeting in Seville.

Many countries face escalating debt burdens, declining investments, decreasing international aid and increasing trade barriers.

Co-hosts the U.N. and Spain believe the meeting is an opportunity to close the staggering $4 trillion annual financing gap to promote development, bring millions of people out of poverty and help achieve the U.N.’s badly lagging Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

Even though the gathering comes amid global economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions, there is hope that the world can address one of the most important global challenges: ensuring all people have access to food, health care, education and water.

More than 70 world leaders are attending, the U.N. said, along with representatives of international financial institutions, development banks, philanthropic organizations, the private sector and civil society.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the delegates that the summit is an opportunity “for us to raise our voice in the face of those who seek to convince us that rivalry and competition will set the tone for humanity and for its future.”

A last-minute US rejection

At the last preparatory meeting on June 17, the United States rejected the outcome document that had been negotiated for months by the U.N.’s 193 member nations and announced its withdrawal from the process and the Seville conference.

The Seville Commitment document, approved by consensus, will be adopted by conference participants without changes. It says delegates have agreed to launch “an ambitious package of reforms and actions to close the financing gap with urgency.”

It calls for a minimum tax revenue of 15% of a country’s gross domestic product to increase government resources, a tripling of lending by multilateral development banks and scaling up of private financing by providing incentives for investing in critical areas like infrastructure. It also calls for reforms to help countries deal with rising debt.

U.N. trade chief Rebeca Grynspan recently said “development is going backward” and the global debt crisis has worsened.

Last year, 3.3 billion people were living in countries that pay more interest on their debts than they spend on health or education, and the number will increase to 3.4 billion people this year, according to Grynspan. And developing countries will pay $947 billion to service debts this year, up from $847 billion last year.

Angolan President Joao Lourenco, speaking for the African Group at the conference, said debt payment “consumes more resources than those allocated to health and education combined” for many countries.

The US objections

While U.S. diplomat Jonathan Shrier told the June 17 meeting that “our commitment to international cooperation and long-term economic development remains steadfast,” he said the text “crosses many of our red lines.”

He said those include interfering with the governance of international financial institutions, tripling the annual lending capacity of multilateral development banks and proposals envisioning a role for the U.N. in the global debt architecture.

Related Articles

22 killed as Israeli forces fire on Palestinians in Gaza seeking food aid, witnesses say

A week into the fragile Israel-Iran peace agreement, here’s what we still don’t know

Today in History: June 30, Night of the Long Knives

Today in History: June 29, Apple releases the first iPhone to consumers

Today in History: June 28, Franz Ferdinand assassinated

Shrier also objected to proposals on trade, tax and innovation that are not in line with U.S. policy, as well as language on a U.N. framework convention on international tax cooperation.

The United States was the world’s largest single founder of foreign aid before the Trump administration dismantled its main aid agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development. It drastically slashed foreign assistance funding, calling it wasteful and contrary to the Republican president’s agenda.

Other Western donors also have cut back international aid.

U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed last week called the U.S. withdrawal from the conference “unfortunate,” adding that after Seville, “we will engage again with the U.S. and hope that we can make the case that they be part of the success of pulling millions of people out of poverty.”

On Monday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reaffirmed the bloc’s commitment to development financing, saying, “Our commitment is here to stay.”

Lederer reported from the United Nations.

By MARK SCOLFORO

STROUDSBURG, Pa. (AP) — A Pennsylvania judge on Monday ordered that three people whose testimony has been requested by defense attorneys will have to travel to Idaho to appear at the trial of a man accused of stabbing to death four college students in 2022.

The defense subpoenas were granted regarding a boxing trainer who knew Bryan Kohberger as a teenager, a childhood acquaintance of Kohberger’s and a third man whose significance was not explained.

The 30-year-old Kohberger, who was arrested at his parents’ home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, weeks after the November 2022 killings, is accused of sneaking into a rental home in Moscow, Idaho, not far from the University of Idaho campus, and attacking Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves.

The deaths shocked the rural Idaho community and neighboring Pullman, Washington, where Kohberger was a graduate student studying criminology at Washington State University.

A prison official came to court with records from Kohberger’s stay in the Monroe County Correctional Facility after he was arrested, although the subpoena hearing was continued because he must still provide a statement attesting to their authenticity.

Common Pleas Judge Arthur Zulick also continued for a week the hearing regarding a subpoena for Ralph Vecchio, who owns a car dealership where Kohberger’s parents purchased a Hyundai Elantra in 2019.

There was uncertainty about whether the subpoena was directed at Vecchio or at his father, who owned the business at the time of the purchase. The judge said prosecution witness subpoenas will also be at issue next week.

A sixth witness’ hearing had previously been rescheduled for next week because of a travel conflict, and the seventh person sought by the defense consented last week to travel to Idaho for the trial expected to begin in August.

Brandon Andreola argued unsuccessfully that his subpoena should be canceled, saying he is his family’s sole breadwinner and is worried publicity might lead to him losing his job.

Andreola said his “relationship with Bryan Kohberger has been minimal and distant since high school,” with their last “significant interaction” taking place in 2020, two years before the stabbings.

“If I’m brought out there, I believe the attention will be multiple times greater than the attention that I’ve received already,” Andreola argued.

Related Articles

Jury begins deliberating in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ sex trafficking trial

National pride is declining in America. And it’s splitting by party lines, new polling shows

US stocks add a bit more to their all-time high

A violent ambush in Idaho leaves 2 firefighters dead and 1 injured. What to know about the attack

Today in History: June 30, Night of the Long Knives

Jesse Harris said he trained Kohberger as a 15- or 16-year-old at a boxing gym but does not think he has testimony that will help the case. Harris also said a relative’s health problems were an issue and he is needed to run a small construction company.

Zulick approved the summonses for Andreola and Harris, along with a third one for witness Anthony Somma, who did not oppose it. Zulick said Harris can return to his courtroom if his family member’s health issues become a barrier to Harris’ ability to travel to Idaho.

Kohberger’s trial on four counts of murder and one count of burglary is on track to begin Aug. 11 in Boise, Idaho, after a judge declined his lawyer’s request for a delay last week.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

In a court filing, his lawyers said Kohberger was on a long drive by himself around the time the four were killed.

Kohberger was silent during his arraignment, prompting a judge to enter a not guilty plea on his behalf.

A gag order has largely kept attorneys, investigators and others from speaking publicly about the investigation or trial. The defense team’s lawyer in the Monroe County Courthouse on Monday, Abigail Parnell, declined to comment.