There’s the art scene, the downtown music scene, the richer-than-god scene, the disillusioned youth scene and the heretofore underrepresented punk-band-turned-violent-anarchists scene. “City on Fire” takes the form of a mystery - who shot Sam, and why? But with so many characters and so many strands of story, it allows the show to comment on all manner of aspects of New York life.

'City on Fire' is more than a mystery drama Kirke’s performance as Regan is particularly strong, as she sorts through a life of unimaginable privilege that is unraveling all around her, but just plows ahead.

The show flits back and forth between all of these characters, and if some are more immediately compelling than others, as you settle into the pacing you begin to look forward to spending time with all of them, either because you enjoy their company (Regan) or hate them but want to find out what they’re up to (Nicky). He bailed on the band and became an artist his gifts currently being squandered on a heroin addiction, much to the misery of his partner Mercer (Xavier Clyde) - who finds Sam in the park after she is shot. Then there is Regan’s brother William (Nico Tortorella), also known as Billy Three-Sticks when he was the leader of an influential punk band, Ex Post Facto. Waiting in the wings is the “demon brother,” Amory (John Cameron Mitchell, up to his usual delightfully diabolical tricks).

Regan’s father is ailing dementia is suspected. Her husband Keith (Ashley Zukerman, straying not too far from his performance as Nate in “Succession”) has been cheating on her, she knows. There is Regan (Jemima Kirke), both heiress to a real-estate fortune and instrumental in the company business. It affects a laundry list of characters all over the map, literally and figuratively. We see a lot of Sam in flashbacks as her relationship with Charlie grows, and as the NYPD tries to solve the shooting. Phoenix 'Suns Live' host Tom Leander: He's seen it all Charlie’s father died on 9/11, a tragedy whose shadow looms over the city and everyone in it. Sam, as she’s called, has befriended Charlie (Wyatt Oleff), a Long Island kid who is as agog over the mysteries of the city as he is over Sam. (The show’s creators, Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, have updated the novel’s time frame from the late 1970s.) That’s Samantha (Chase Sui Wonders), a New York University student who winds up on the wrong side of a gun in Central Park on July 4, 2003, and spends much of the series hovering between life and death.

Novel this is how it always is