If John Sugar, the PI played by a gravel-voiced Colin Farrell in the eponymous crime drama “Sugar,” seems like too much a collection of noir clichés and male fantasies to be a plausible protagonist, that’s partly by design. But the Apple TV+ series, created by screenwriter Mark Protosevich (“I Am Legend,” Spike Lee’s “Oldboy”), executive produced by Audrey Chon (“The Twilight Zone” reboot, “Invasion”) Simon Kinberg (the original “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Dark Phoenix”) and directed by Fernando Meirelles (“The Constant Gardener,” “The Two Popes”), doesn’t reveal its true nature until far too late in the game — at which point a clumsy twist introduces an entirely new premise with little in the way of legible buildup or coherent follow-through. Until then, viewers spend the better part of the eight-episode season trudging through a rote mystery weighed down by clumsy dialogue and wooden performances. It’s likely many won’t reach the twist at all, and they won’t be any worse off for doing so.
We first meet Sugar in Tokyo, where a black-and-white prologue establishes the freelancer as an expert in discreetly finding missing persons. After tracking down the kidnapped child of a yakuza boss, Sugar is quickly recalled to Los Angeles, where his insistence on wearing a suit in a sea of athleisure instantly evokes Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” But rather than simply riff on recognizable motifs from detective fiction and classic film, “Sugar” is far more overt and less creative in incorporating its influences. Sugar loves the movies, which we know because he’s prone to saying things like “I love the movies.” Not only is such exposition a poor substitute for more specific references that could inject more personality, it’s supplemented by actual film clips wedged into the episodes via cuts that come off both abrupt and distracting. Out-of-context excerpts from “Sunset Boulevard,” “Double Indemnity,” “Touch of Evil” and others largely serve to remind us how far “Sugar” falls short of its self-identified bar.
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Sugar’s latest client is veteran film producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), whose granddaughter Olivia (Sydney Chandler) has disappeared without a trace. Olivia’s father Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris) brushes off her absence as a presumed relapse into past struggles with addiction; Sugar’s associate Ruby (Kirby, who has dropped Howell-Baptiste from her professional name) cautions him against taking the case — ostensibly because he’s overworked, though there’s clearly some ulterior motive at play. Nevertheless, Farrell’s obtrusive and overused voiceover expounds on his fascination with “this case,” as in: “I should be narrowing things down, but the case just keeps growing.” Sugar’s obsession stands in stark contrast with the dull, bland mystery presented to the audience.
There could be some campy pleasures in even a rote Hollywood whodunit, and “Sugar” offers a few on the way to its bizarre conclusion. Bernie’s ex-wife Melanie (Amy Ryan), a lapsed rock star and mother figure to Olivia, owns the show’s obligatory source of mid-century modern real estate porn, a prerequisite of any Southland-set crime yarn; Olivia’s half-brother David (Nate Corddry), an aging child actor, anchors a deeply silly storyline with his mother Margit (Anna Gunn), which treats us to Skyler White fulminating about “this town.” But as a whole, this overqualified cast performs far below their established abilities, weighed down by material too broad and self-serious to allow for an inspired turn like Ryan’s cello-playing villainess from “Only Murders in the Building,” a more successful deconstruction of our crime-obsessed culture.
Farrell himself is not immune from these pitfalls. Sugar seems designed as a bridge between the leading man roles he took on in the aughts and the soulful vulnerability of later-career roles like his sweater-sporting sad sack in “The Banshees of Inisherin.” (There’s also the second season of “True Detective,” another California noir which, whatever its flaws, maintained a more consistent and immersive mood than “Sugar” ever achieves.) But even though there’s an eventual explanation, the hero’s perfection quickly grates. He’s an expert fighter, and the kind of guy who takes time to help an unhoused person, and is fluent in several languages. Along with Ruby, Sugar belongs to a polyglot club that’s more of a secret society.
For most of the show, Sugar comes off as unconvincing wish fulfillment. If “Sugar” were able to sell its 11th-hour hairpin turn, it would need to earn our buy-in first through a more grounded portrait of a lost, searching soul. Instead, the show feels detached from reality even before it takes a turn for the surreal. With the element of surprise used so ineffectively, one wishes “Sugar” didn’t feel the need to disguise itself in the first place. Were the show more open from the start, it would instantly become an intriguing — if not necessarily successful — hybrid of genres, not an unsatisfying take on a familiar one. In its current, disjointed form, “Sugar” leaves an aftertaste that’s far from sweet.
The first two episodes of “Sugar” are now streaming on Apple TV+, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Fridays.
