Stream It Or Skip It: ‘City On Fire’ On Apple TV+, Where A Number Of Lives Intersect Through A Shooting In Central Park

The 2015 novel City On Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg was hailed in some circles as the next Great American Novel, but others thought it was overrated. But its intersecting stories and 1977 timeframe at least made it intriguing. When Gossip Girl‘s Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage decided to adapt the novel for a series, they moved the time period from those heady late ’70s days to, of all years, 2003. Does that help or hurt the show?

CITY ON FIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Fireworks go off over Manhattan. “4th OF JULY 2003.” We hear a man screaming “NO!”

The Gist: That young man, Mercer (Xavier Clyde), is flagging down emergency vehicles after he finds a girl just inside Central Park suffering from gunshot wounds. A teen, Charlie (Wyatt Oleff), is running in the opposite direction.

“A FEW WEEKS EARLER.” Charlie is talking to his therapist about the young woman, Samantha Yeung (Chase Sui Wonders), whom he met in a record store after one of his sessions some months earlier. Charlie goes into the city from Long Island for the sessions, which he started after his father died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Sam was a year ahead of him in high school out on Long Island, so she’s now a freshman at NYU.

They become fast friends, and the budding artist shows him a zine that documents a band she follows called X Post Facto. As their friendship progresses, she tells him more about the band, but his mom bans him from seeing her after he comes home on New Years’ Day with a raging hangover. But after the six months are up, she calls him and invites him to see a reformed X Post Facto with a new singer.

Meanwhile, Regan Hamilton Sweeney (Jemima Kirke) looks like she’s living the ideal Upper East Side life, until she gets an anonymous note from what she knows is the mistress of her husband Keith (Ashley Zuckerman). She confronts him, and he decides to deflect blame and cite their crumbling marriage as the cause.

On the day of a choir recital, Mercer, a teacher at the school where Regan’s daughter goes, tells her that he knows her brother Billy (Nico Tortorella). A few weeks later, after moving her and her kids out of the apartment she shared with Keith, she gives Mercer an invitation for him and Billy to come to her family’s annual July 4th white party. Yes, she comes from one of those families, but she thinks this is an opening to bring Billy back into the fold.

Billy and Mercer live together, but Mercer wonders if being in a relationship with an admitted narcissist is a good idea. Billy gives Mercer an iMac for his birthday but then buggers off to shoot heroin in a bathroom at Grand Central Terminal. There, he runs into members of his former band, X Post Facto, who tell him that they’re playing a gig with a new singer, Nicky Chaos (Max Milner) that night. Of course, Billy decides to blow off his boyfriend and go.

Meanwhile, Sam’s involvement with the band members seems to include helping them set fire to various places in the city, like a church. The night of the comeback show, she helps them get fireworks from her father’s warehouse in order to set up the next bombing. She arrives at the club with Charlie, but leaves quickly in order to meet Keith outside where the Sweeney 4th of July party is being held; she insists that she did not send the note to Regan.

Regan goes to the party waiting for Keith to show up; instead, her step-uncle Amory Gould (John Cameron Mitchell) tells her that her father will be up on securities charges, and as his COO, she needs to be ready for a federal probe. Mercer shows up to the party without Billy and hits it off with Regan; they’re smoking a joint on the roof when they hear gunshots.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? City On Fire is reminiscent of a bunch of “lives intersecting” network shows, most notably A Million Little Things. Given that the show was adapted from the 2015 novel by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, there are certainly shades of their shows Gossip Girl and The O.C., as well.

Our Take: Schwartz and Savage take Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel and move the timeline from 1977 to 2003, likely centering it on that year in order to incorporate a massive blackout, which happened in New York City during both years and is a major part of the book’s plot. We get why they did it; they know a hell of a lot more about that time period than they do about the late ’70s. But by doing so, they shave off a lot of the personality the setting gave to the book.

New York in 1977 was a broken city; New York in 2003 was still reeling from 9/11, but there certainly wasn’t the rising level of discontent that there was a quarter century earlier. Let’s just say there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of looting and riots during the ’03 blackout, for instance. It was a period when people would move there certain that they were going to make it as something other than an office drone, and there was a lot of navel gazing going on. It’s the era that led to the creation of Gawker and people ripping open their personal lives in blogs and somehow getting book contracts from it.

So it’s not a surprise that the characters in City On Fire are all pretty much an unlikable, solipsistic lot, whether it’s the young millennials like Sam, Charlie, Billy or Nicky or the overprivileged Xers like Regan or Keith. To all of them, the world revolves around them and their problems; it seems like the only character who has any sort of empathy is Mercer, and he simply suffers from being in a relationship with an irredeemable schmuck like Billy.

The eye-rolling machinations that Savage and Schwartz go through to make sure this disparate group of people are connected are par for the course for a show like this. Yes, it’s annoying that Sam is all at once having sex with Keith, helping X Post Facto blow up churches and being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Charlie, and Wonders does her best to make her more than just a cipher to hang everyone else’s stories off of. But Sam is the least of this show’s problems, and we may see more of her actual character as she recovers from being shot.

It’s the rest of the characters that make us dive for the remote. Do we care that Sam got shot? Sure. Do we care who shot her? Nope. In fact, if it turns out that they all came along and shot her and all of them go to prison for it, we’d just shrug and say, “Huh. Serves them right.”

Sex and Skin: None, at least in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Mercer is put in the back of a patrol car, not because his jacket was found on Sam after she got shot, but because there was heroin in the pocket (the jacket was Billy’s). But, in reality, he’s in the back of the patrol car because he happened to find her in the park while being Black. Sam is loaded into an ambulance, shockingly still alive, but not really since Wonders is the star of the show.

Sleeper Star: Jemima Kirke has come a long way from Girls, hasn’t she? Now she plays a former bohemian wild child that “killed” that version of her to get married to Keith, have kids, and work for her father.

Most Pilot-y Line: Regan tries to reassure her 12-year-old son that her divorce from his dad “had nothing to do with you,” and he replies, “No shit.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. City On Fire is full of self-indulgent characters and takes place during a time period in New York where being self-indulgent was not only encouraged but celebrated. We lived through that time period; we don’t need to experience it again.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.