When future TV historians point to the death knell of Hollywood’s obsession with “prestige TV”,Apple TV’s new seriesSugar must be a target. The eight-part noir series has all the rote ingredients – an Oscar-nominated art-house auteur behind the camera,a respected A-lister as its lead,even a slick title sequence to open each episode – and they’re all in service of such boggling inanity that you’ll immediately rewatch the whole thing in bug-eyed shock.
Colin Farrell is John Sugar,and he has a secret.Apple TV
What initially seems an intriguing meditation on the way media has saturated our lives and defined our behaviours,by way of the detective noir – one of cinema and TV’s most cliched and self-referential genre forms – turns into something so ludicrous by episode six that to spoil it would deprive you of one of the year’s most goofily bonkers TV pivots.
Directed and co-produced by Brazilian fave Fernando Meirelles (City of God,The Constant Gardener) and created and co-written by Mark Protosevich (The Cell,I Am Legend),the series stars Colin Farrell – in his first major role since his acclaimed turn inThe Banshees of Inisherin – as John Sugar,a private investigator with a love of fine whiskey and film criticism (he readsCahiers du Cinema,Sight and Sound,American Cinematographer),and a classic moral code (he hates guns and violence but will use them very effectively when necessary).
Like any private dick,Sugar’s got his own reason for doing the job;sometime in the past his sister went missing,so he searches for others as spiritual retribution. So when he’s hired by Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell),the legendary patriarch of a Hollywood dynasty,to find his missing granddaughter Olivia,Sugar dives obsessively into a conspiracy that stretches through Hollywood’s sordid NDA-curtain,political cover-ups and sex-trafficking criminal gangs.
So far,so familiar – which is the point. As a director,Meirelles is a child in a sandpit,indulging in a genre’s shared romance and language – he plays with noir’s infamous angles,exposures,shadows,jump cuts and,notably,with actual film footage from noir cinema’s golden age,black-and-white footage of Robert Mitchum inOut of the Past,Glenn Ford inThe Big Heat,Charlton Heston inTouch of Evil,Humphrey Bogart inDark Passageand so on,interspersed with Sugar’s mission as a metatextual shorthand explaining the character’s identity and milieu. It’s playful and weird and intellectual,until it all but disappears around episode three and the series prioritises a flimsy plot that feels like any free-to-air crime procedural.
By this point (if you make it this far) you’ll get the sense that something stranger is up. Sugar’s deference to his M-like superior Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) hints there’s more to his operation than the classic Marlowe-esque man against the world. And Farrell’s performance is so stilted it skews towards;you’ll be asking yourself what this guy’s deal is.
In episode six the plot twist is revealed and it’s a doozy,prefaced with footage of Mitchum’s love-hate monologue fromNight of the Hunter,which becomes the series’ sophomoric thesis.
Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Ruby,John Sugar’s suspicious superior.Apple TV
The series’ Easter-y release might be telling;Sugar,like its director,feels intensely Catholic. Meirelles’ last film,2019’sThe Two Popes,was a biographical drama about Pope Francis’ succession following Pope Benedict XVI’s abdication,while his breakthrough,2002’sCity of God,borrowed its title from the favela named for Saint Augustine’s 5th-century treatise on good and evil,spiritual self-flagellation and redemption. As such,Sugar’s closest corollary might be Netflix’s 2021 seriesMidnight Mass by Mike Flanagan,another deranged genre exercise that approached similar themes via the dottiness of,um,vampire angels.
In a forgiving moodSugar’s an ambitious swing and a heady head-scratcher – and,to be fair,there’s more intrigue in the bizarre places the series might go next than in the eight episodes it takes to reveal itself. But in an ordinary mood it’s a silly waste of time and comically not-as-advertised. What’s the classic Hollywood noir clip to signify the feeling you’ve been cheated?
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