Some viewers are allergic to even hearing the word “twist” before watching a film or TV series. The mere mention of the existence of a twist can have the effect of rewiring your brain so that you lose track of the intended narrative in the process of attempting to crack an underlying textual code.
I have no wariness, though, in revealing that Apple TV+‘s Sugar is a mystery with a twist. Mark Protosevich’s series is unambiguous in its ambiguity, peppering viewers with hints and clues about its true nature almost from the very beginning, even though the grand reveal comes more than halfway through. It’s a strategy that works far better in a 100-minute movie than in an eight-episode show, even if most of those episodes run under 40 minutes.
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Sugar
The problem isn’t that the twist in Sugar doesn’t work. It’s actually quite intriguing. But almost all of that intrigue will have to wait for a second season, because although the twist is actually the premise of the overall series, the coyness is the point of the first season. And it’s that coyness that threatens to kill Sugar, or at least to drain most of the interest from the familiar and frequently bland foregrounded plot.
On the surface, Sugar is the story of John Sugar (Farrell), a dapper gumshoe who tracks down missing people on behalf of an elite clientele. Sugar, who has a collection of bespoke Savile Row suits and speaks an astonishing number of languages, doesn’t like violence, but when the job requires it, he’s smooth and lethal.
After an opening black-and-white sequence in Tokyo, Sugar’s next job brings him back to Los Angeles, where he has a standing bungalow at an upscale hotel and a concerned handler, Ruby (Kirby, formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste). Ruby is worried about Sugar’s physical and psychological condition and urges him away from an upcoming case, but Sugar can’t be dissuaded from meeting with Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), a legendary film producer.
When Sugar is done fanboying over a client whose films he has seen multiple times each, he gets the case: Siegel’s granddaughter (Sydney Chandler’s Olivia) has vanished.
Her father (Dennis Boutsikaris’s Bernie), a producer of lesser repute, isn’t worried because Olivia is an addict prone to disappearing and popping up in rehab, but Jonathan is sure that Olivia had turned her life around and something is very wrong. Olivia’s half-brother David (Nate Corddry), a former child star, is too busy plotting his comeback vehicle to care — except that he has some tawdry secrets he doesn’t want Sugar to discover, and he’s willing to hire some dangerous people to throw him off the scent.
Sugar, meanwhile, drives around Los Angeles in a vintage blue Corvette, conducting interviews (starting with Amy Ryan‘s Melanie, a former rock star and Olivia’s former stepmother); making new friends (principally an exceptionally good dog named Wiley); and lecturing viewers via a steady, noir-infused voiceover.
The search for Olivia is the story.
But it’s not the story that most viewers will be investing in.
Protosevich litters the dialogue with oblique references and clues to something bigger that’s afoot. Some of it concerns Sugar’s backstory, which includes an absent sister of his own, since television’s recent glut of amateur and professional detectives has taught us that nobody seeks justice without their own internalized and unresolved history with injustice.
But then there are the weirder things, like references to unseen authority figures and shady-sounding societies, or the ornate mystery box that keeps popping up, or Sugar’s strange hand tremor, or the fact that he’s always glancing nervously at the moon, or the metabolism that lets him drink 50 times more than the average person without getting drunk.
The series’ directors — mostly Fernando Meirelles, who helms five of the eight episodes, plus Adam Arkin — build a mood of uncertainty by alternating between disorientingly tight close-ups and canted angles through doorways or around obstructions. Our eye is always steered away from what’s in front of us or trained to look for unusual tics or subtle responses.
There’s a conflicted visual style that’s half outside voyeur trying to make sense of the enigma that is John Sugar, and half Sugar’s own perspective on Hollywood. Sugar idolizes stars like Glenn Ford and Humphrey Bogart, and as he navigates his way through Beverly Hills and Hollywood, staking out witnesses and bracing suspects, he experiences the town through a prism that includes clips from Gilda, Touch of Evil and more films than I can count. The references aren’t exclusively retro whodunnits, though it isn’t always as obvious why, for example, Edwin Porter’s 1903 Great Train Robbery would be in his vernacular. Or why, if he’s able to mention L.A. Confidential, it doesn’t disturb him that his client looks an awful lot like Dudley “Rollo Tomasi” Smith. The clips may be a gimmick, but they’re an appealing gimmick.
Sugar loves movies. Sugar loves Los Angeles — its architecture, its landmarks, its glamour. However rough and rotten L.A. might be at its core, it’s a city of dreams and dreamers. The series around him shares and feeds off of that reverence, as does Farrell’s terrific performance, all tightly coiled restraint that unravels as the show pushes us closer and closer to his truth. The actor, whose genre credentials include the generally forgotten second season of True Detective on the mystery front and Ask the Dust on the retro Los Angeles tip, is almost effortlessly cool and confident in this space.
Is the riddle of John Sugar crackable? Absolutely, but in extending that riddle over most of a season, Protosevich distributes enough red herrings that I kept going back and forth between a trio of suspicions — one that would have been obvious and stupid, one that would have been wild and difficult, and one that eventually turned out to be the answer. I would have traded the misdirects and belabored sleight-of-hand for a reveal within the first episode or two — a reveal that could have been surprising and still left ample room to deal with what it all means rather than just how cool it all is.
The season’s ostensible mystery just isn’t all that gripping and, unlike Sugar’s mystery, it can’t be solved by attentive viewers. It quickly becomes more of an impediment than a value-add, a half-hearted pastiche of the movies Sugar adores and a completely toothless commentary on the current entertainment industry, anchored by a victim we barely know, suspects who barely register and a total absence of stakes for anybody. That’s despite the compassion Chandler generates in a blink of screen time, how expertly suspicious Cromwell and Boutsikaris are, and how much bruised vulnerability Ryan conveys.
It’s a deep cast, but the show doesn’t know how to use many of its best pieces — like Kirby, who exists only to distribute bread crumbs to the twist; Jason Butler Harner as Sugar’s overly sincere anthropologist friend; a wonderfully menacing, generally superfluous Eric Lange; or inexplicably cast and shamelessly wasted Emmy winner Anna Gunn (age 55) as the mother to Corddry’s (age 46) character.
Offer me Colin Farrell as a hardboiled private investigator obsessed with classic Hollywood thrillers and I’m there! Give me the series that the twist reveals Sugar to truly be, and I’m probably game for that as well. But Sugar spends so long laying the foundation for the show it eventually becomes that it’s easy to get irritated by the show that it is in the interim. Caterpillars are cute and butterflies are beautiful, but nobody wants to hang out with a pupa.
