Sugar review: Slow-paced but surprising noir
Review Overview
Colin Farrell
8Concept
7Pacing
3Ivan Radford | On 05, May 2024
This review is based on all episodes of Season 1.
Who is Veronica Salt? That was the marketing slogan behind the Angelina Jolie spy thriller of 2004. Swap out Salt for Sugar and you end up with the same driving force behind the narrative of Apple TV+s new thriller. The show stars Colin Farrell as John Sugar, a generically named private detective whose existence is steeped in genre conventions. A movie-obsessive who sees the world as if through a camera lens, he positions himself as an outside observer of human behaviour – and that detachment works both does and doesn’t work in the show’s favour.
After a beautifully moody and monochrome prologue, we pick up as John gets a new client in the form of movie producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell). Jonathan’s granddaughter, Olivia (Sydney Chandler), has gone missing, so John commits to finding her. That means crossing paths with Olivia’s shady father, Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris), and her half-brother, David (Nathan Corddry), who fancies himself a serious actor. Neither of them think there’s much to worry about, which only makes Olivia’s disappearance seem more sinister. And then there’s her stepmum, Melanie (the always-excellent Amy Ryan), an ageing rock star whose main work these days is drinking. She’s not telling him everything but, then again, neither is he. We can tell this because they both say to each other that they have secrets but that they couldn’t possibly say what they are.
That habit of telling rather than showing is an unfortunate one, because it emphasises the show’s central challenge: that it has a really interesting idea it wants to explore but takes a long time to start doing so. Why is John so drawn to this case? Is it because it means spending time in the film industry world? Or because he’s motivated by a similar loss from his past? The truth is both and neither, which is the kind of ambiguity that makes for an intriguing character study, albeit one that would benefit from being told at twice the speed – the secrets-heavy conversation between him and Melanie is the kind of scene-setting that could have been in the very first episode, but instead is held back for several chapters.
Instead, Sugar prefers to bide its time and unspool its vision gradually. That means lots of opportunity to wonder why John’s handler, Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), is so against him taking the job. And lots of moments in which John behaves strangely without explanation. He briefly mentions that he processes alcohol more quickly than a typical human body, for example, only for that to go unaddressed for several episodes. His arm twitches uncontrollably and he blacks out at key moments, without any doctors getting involved. He talks at length about how he doesn’t like violence, only to become increasingly violent in Jason Bourne-esque outbursts fuelled by a deep-buried survival instinct. And he’s overly nice to a man experiencing homelessness in a way that’s both endearing and oddly tone-deaf.
All these undeveloped glimpses of someone who’s far from your typical human would be frustrating if they were being acted by almost anyone else. Thankfully, Sugar has Colin Farrell as its star, and he’s wonderful to watch in action, inhabiting the different and conflicting aspects of John with an otherworldly strangeness and a natural, lived-in earthiness. Whether it’s action or earnest existential pondering, Farrell is a slick and cool screen presence, always looking sharp in a suit and repeatedly bringing a disarming vulnerability to his hard-boiled private eye. The supporting cast, particularly a growing ensemble of John’s colleagues, are also strong and help to elevate the clunkier lines of dialogue.
The pacing, though, remains the key obstacle, with a final third that begins to promise something more ambitious than your standard neo-noir thriller. It also brings added meaning to the intertextual, meta presentation that’s woven throughout the series – we constantly process moments through clips from old movies, putting us in the same voyeuristic shoes as John, whose understanding of human nature stems from remixing reels and reels of Hollywood classics in his head.
That creatively bold and visually arresting device is entirely at odds with the tell-don’t-show nature of the script, including the intrusive voiceover narration. The result is a show that feels stranded between two worlds, and the more Sugar embraces its own unique identity, the less detached and the more absorbing it feels. “When it comes to people, I still have a lot to learn,” reflects John at one point. Come the finale, we’re left feeling the same about him – and, in a way, that’s intentionally the point. The question is how many people will still be watching and take the leap required to appreciate it. Because Sugar, for all its flaws, is an ambitious oddity that’s worth getting to know.