'City on Fire' review: NYC-set drama lacks sparks

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The buzzed-about 2015 novel "City on Fire" by Garth Risk Hallberg gets adapted into an Apple TV+ series, with its setting changed from 1970s New York City to 2003.

It revolves around the Fourth of July Central Park shooting of Samantha Yeung (Chase Sui Wonders) and the stories of the people the New York University student impacted. These include protagonist Charlie (Wyatt Oleff), a lonely high schooler, and the married Keith (Ashley Zukerman), with whom Samantha has been having an affair.

Then there's Keith's wife, Regan (Jemima Kirke), the scion of an extremely wealthy family and her estranged brother William (Nico Tortorella). He once fronted Samantha's favorite band, a downtown punk outfit now led by Nicky Chaos (Max Milner), a friend of Samantha's who sidelines along with his fellow band members and other pals in a bit of citywide arson.

Oh, William also has a drug addiction, and his boyfriend Mercer (Xavier Clyde) tries desperately to get him to reconnect with Regan in an effort to get him clean.

Get all that? No? Well, in case you needed some more plot, there's also a police investigation, a separate bit about federal financial charges, and that's just everything apparent after a viewing of the first three of eight episodes.

MY SAY Clearly, "City on Fire" has a lot on its mind. That begins with the decision to set the story at this particular post-9/11 moment, in a city overtaken by grief and uncertainty, and at the precipice of the accelerated gentrification of the Bloomberg years.

Co-creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (best known, collectively, for "The O.C." and "Gossip Girl") have a sharp eye for the setting, including a sweeping image of the giant cavern at Ground Zero, as well as the uneasy intersection of the gritty downtown music scene and the palatial apartments uptown.

But any interesting facet gets sabotaged by a leaden story. "City on Fire" becomes filled with characters who could not be less interesting, often having just a peripheral connection to the central plotline, while being given dialogue that consists of reams of exposition.

The mystery of who shot Samantha carries less dramatic weight than its makers intend through the first three episodes. There are only a few potential suspects, with obvious motives, and nothing in the way of compelling developments that might force the audience to reconsider things.

Samantha herself has no defining personality, other than being the exact sort of charming, quirky female character that exists to affirm whatever her fellow characters want to get from her. It's the type of character who once came across as such a ubiquitous cliché, in so many movies and shows, that it became dubbed the "manic pixie dream girl."

But even given the fundamental simplicity at the core of this story, you practically need one of those complicated movie detective charts to keep track of these characters, how they all know each other and exactly what they're talking about in each scene.

It requires way too much effort, with too little payoff.

BOTTOM LINE A convoluted mess, despite great potential.