Back in 2015, Garth Risk Hallberg’s Kirkus-starred debut historical novel, City on Fire, was one of the most anticipated books of the year. There was a lot of buzz around the 30-something author; he’d received a multimillion-dollar advance from Knopf for the massive, 927-page tome—a stab at the Great American Novel set mainly in New York City in 1976 and ’77. It’s now been adapted as an eight-episode miniseries, set not in the ’70s, but, oddly, in the early 2000s. Its first three episodes premiere May 12 on Apple TV+.
The show’s switch from 1977 to 2003 is a puzzler, at first. The most obvious explanation is that it’s simply cheaper to portray the New York of 20 years ago, when it looked pretty much like it does now. (The city also experienced a blackout in both years, which is convenient.) It’s easy to imagine the show’s creators, Gossip Girl’s Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, doing the math and thinking, Do we have to set it the ’70s? Surprisingly, the answer is not really—because the novel isn’t really about that decade. It’s not even about New York. It’s about Hallberg’s vast cast of characters, who are mostly White, mostly rich, and mostly bland.
Samantha “Sam” Cicciaro, a young fanzine writer originally from Long Island, gets involved with a punk band led by coked-up arsonist and would-be revolutionary Nicky Chaos. The band’s ex-frontman, artist and addict William Hamilton-Sweeney III (aka “Billy Three-Sticks”), hails from a super-wealthy Manhattan family, and William’s sister, Regan is married to the sketchy Keith Lamplighter, who’s having an affair with Sam. (It’s easy to play “Six Degrees of Sam” with this cast—surprising, considering they live in a city of millions.)
On New Year’s Eve 1976, Sam is shot by an unknown assailant in Central Park; she’s found by William’s boyfriend, a Black aspiring novelist named Mercer Goodman, who recently moved to the city from Georgia. (Sam survives, but she’s in a coma.) Sam’s teenage friend Charlie Weisbarger also witnessed the aftermath of the shooting; distraught, he soon finds himself entangled with Nicky and his plans.
The book expends many pages on the predictable inner lives of these and a lot of other characters who connect to one another in contrived ways: There’s hard-drinking magazine writer Richard Groskoph, who ends up meeting Sam while doing a piece on her fireworks-technician father; Bruno Augenblink, William’s former art teacher who owns a downtown gallery; and Bruno’s assistant, Jenny Nguyen, who happens to be Richard’s neighbor. Nearly every character in the book can be described as vaguely dissatisfied with their lives, though some handle their ennui better than others.
They all occupy a version of New York that never feels alive; it’s just a stage for the author’s made-up friends to play on. Hallberg gestures toward well-known historical details—“Oh right. This fiscal crisis thing. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”—but provides almost no context for them. The ’77 blackout, one of the most significant events of the period, feels anticlimactic; it’s just something for Mercer, Jenny, et al., to float through. Even the book’s title seems like less of a reference to the city’s epidemic of arson—one that gutted the South Bronx—than it is to a (fictional) punk song’s lyrics: “City on fire, city on fire / One is a gas, two is a match / and we too are a city on fire.”
The miniseries wisely streamlines the cast—jettisoning Richard, for instance, and reducing Bruno’s and Jenny’s parts significantly—and focuses the plot mostly on the mystery of Sam’s shooting. This gives the narrative more structure, which it sorely needs. There are a few standout performances: Bodies Bodies Bodies’ Chase Sui Wonders is quite good as the confident but naïve Sam, and Younger’s Nico Tortorella is compelling as the self-destructive, commitment-phobic William. The show also gives a few characters larger roles: Amory Gould, William’s shady, power-hungry relative-by-marriage, is a villainous presence in the book, but he gets much more to do in the series, played with panache by the entertaining John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Alexandra Doke gives punk rocker Sewer Girl a welcome toughness and vulnerability; in the novel, she’s little more than a groupie cliché.
Still, the show’s 2003 setting inevitably raises a few questions. It’s unlikely, for example, that a group of arsonist bombers would freely roam New York without attracting significant attention just two years after the 9/11 attacks. It’s also hard to believe that a young woman would put so much effort into a fanzine in 2003, when she would have had access to a thing called the internet. Still, if you can ignore such complaints, it’s reasonably watchable, for the most part. Just don’t expect it to set the world on fire.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
