The Case for Sugar

The big twist was always going to make or break Sugar, Apple TV’s contemporary neo-noir starring Colin Farrell as a dapper, tender, classic Hollywood–loving private investigator who happens to be a blue-skinned extraterrestrial in human disguise. It’s a fact abundantly signaled but audaciously withheld until deep into the first season, and though I share my colleague Kathryn VanArendonk’s take that Sugar should’ve led with this revelation — it’s literally the premise and what makes the show distinct — I understand the logic behind keeping the secret. For one thing, mystery boxes keep a show’s curiosity engine running reliably beyond the first few episodes. For another, the twist is cuckoo bananas. Colin Farrell is an alien! Who loves cinema! And someone thought there could be a series around this!

Some viewers surely found the revelation too outrageous to hang with, so when season two arrived in mid-June for the gobsmacked weirdos (that is, you and I) still tuning in, Sugar opted for the simplest path forward: The gumshoe gets another case. Drawn to work pro bono for an up-and-coming boxer, Danny (Jin Ha), whose missing brother (Raymond Lee) was up to no good when last spotted, Sugar encounters the underworld of fentanyl distribution and corrupt cops along with a new antagonist (an always welcome Tony Dalton). The show has turned into a case-of-the-season procedural with the alien stuff humming in the background as the overarching mythology. And it works! Now largely freed from the obligations of its wild twist, Sugar gets to settle in and savor what it is: a charming and goofy genre piece that commits so hard to the bit that, in fleeting moments, it attains emotional transcendence.

Credit where it’s due for some smart interseason adjustments. With showrunning duties passed from creator Mark Protosevich to Sam Catlin, a veteran of Breaking Bad and Preacher, season-two’s rhythm is zippier, the dialogue is a touch funnier, and even the color grading seems to have been adjusted to produce a richer, more delicious vision of Los Angeles. Season one ended with the case of a Hollywood mogul’s missing granddaughter resolved, but Sugar’s blue buddies, who had been on Earth for a peaceful observation mission, were forced to vacate after a senator discovered their identities and threatened exposure. Sugar, a lover of Los Angeles and humanity in equal measure and driven by an ongoing search for his own missing alien sister (Mireille Enos), chose to stay. The new season opens with a bit of yadda yadda that resets the board and throws Sugar off the scent of his sister, effectively wiping the extraterrestrial story line off the slate for most of the season. Sugar’s earthbound life is fleshed out, pulling in new company in the form of street hustler Val (Sasha Calle), whom he takes in as a protégée, and federal agent Tom Flyvbjerg (Shea Whigham), a friend from a prior (off-screen) case who serves as a helpful collaborator with resources. The resulting run of episodes isn’t quite on the great second-season leap of a Parks and Rec or The Leftovers, but the show now feels like what it wanted to be.

The reason any of Sugar works comes purely down to Farrell. Three decades into a winding, prolific, and utterly captivating career, the Irish actor has settled into a fascinating duality. On one side, there is the loud, dominating Farrell of The Penguin and Ballad of a Small Player; my favorite will always be the Farrell who punched a kid in True Detective’s appropriately maligned second season. On the other side, there is the painfully tender Farrell, he of The Banshees of Inisherin, After Yang, and the ill-begotten Big Bold Beautiful Journey. As John Sugar, Farrell luxuriates in this softer register, charming the pants off hospital security guards, walking among the downtrodden like alien Jesus, and taking in a studio-lot tour with earnest awe. Just as affecting is the bleeding heart he brings to the role, those naturally mournful eyes carrying the loneliness of an exile who’s fallen a little too deeply in love with the planet he’s stranded on and, inevitably, with Charlotte (Laura Donnelly), the mysterious woman he keeps crossing paths with at the luxe hotel he calls home. Farrell is so absorbing and fun to watch that you start ignoring basic logic questions associated with the setup. Can Sugar’s particular species of alien bone with human beings? (How does that work biologically?) Surely, Sugar feels weird that Charlotte is being comically vague about her humanitarian job? How rich is Sugar supposed to be? Don’t worry about it! Smooth out that brain, and let the pleasure of Sugar’s crisp vision of Southern California wash all over you.

Pleasure, really, is the name of the game with Sugar. It’s a show built around the delight of watching a beautiful man in a beautiful suit solve crimes in a beautiful city while every so often dropping into a reverie about the unbearable strangeness of being a lonely alien on a cruel planet he has grown to love more than he should. A charitable heart may even find poetry in the metaphor, clunky as it plays when delivered with a straight face. Sugar is an immigrant, you see, a connection the show makes twice in this season’s first two episodes. “Los Angeles is a city of immigrants,” he narrates, driving the beautiful 1966 Corvette Stingray he loves so much. “In a way, I’m an immigrant too.” Elsewhere, “Danny’s an immigrant, like me.” There’s delight too in the dorky goofiness of how naturally season two wears the whole Sugar’s-an-alien thing. “There’s music on our planet,” he narrates in one episode, walking into a neon-lit club pulsing with techno. “A single note sustained through a stalk of folded grass. But the music here is … well, it’s different.” Oontz-oontz-oontz. Above all, there’s pleasure in the show’s full-bodied adoration for hard-boiled noir and all the little flourishes that come with it. Whigham’s friendly Fed is a particular delight. One scene gives you the image of him stacking reading glasses on top of sunglasses as he cautions his obsessed buddy. “This is another one of your fuckin’ Chinatowns, man,” he says.

Sugar has the terroir of a deeply specific passion project, released at precisely the moment the streaming business has largely lost the appetite and capacity to fund deeply specific passion projects. It feels like a holdover from that delirious stretch of Peak TV abundance when a platform could hand Farrell eight episodes, a beautiful suit, and a vintage Corvette and then trust that pleasure alone might be enough. That window has long since closed. Given all that — and frankly, given how goofy this show is — a third season seems unlikely. But bleeding hearts keep dreaming. There should always be a place in the universe for more Sugar.