Sugar: Colin Farrell Series Meanders Through the L.A. Detective Genre Sleuthing For Something New

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The gloomy, hard-edged L.A. detective fiction, defined and dominated by the legacy of Raymond Chandler and elevated to psychological complexity by Ross McDonald, are adult fairytales, both cliched and potentially profound.

The familiar, interchangeable ingredients (a rich old man, an unfaithful wife, a missing daughter, a sex scandal, gangsters, lots of alcohol  and gun play) can be arranged in myriad ways: reconstructed (Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential), updated as contemporary social commentary (Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye), or both updated and parodied (the Coen Brother’s The Big Lebowski). 

Kirby and Colin Farrell in Sugar

Now comes Sugar, a new Apple TV+ eight-part series starring Colin Farrell, premiering on April 5, which promises a “genre-bending” take on the form. The series is written by Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend, Thor) and directed by Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) and television veteran, Adam Arkin.

Judging by the opening Tokyo episode, shot in black and white, you might guess: A period drama about an American detective amid a yakuza drama? But no, that’s just a teaser and soon John Sugar (Farrell) is back in L.A., where the protagonist meets his maternal handler/dispatcher Ruby (British actress Kirby, formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who is worried about his physical and mental health. She wants him to decline an upcoming case, about the missing grand-daughter of a legendary Hollywood producer, Jonathan Siegel (played by James Cromwell, a casting nod to L.A. Confidential).

Indeed, for half of the series, the main mystery is guessing what the genre twist is, and what explains the odd behaviour of Sugar, a private eye who specializes in finding missing people. More like the international James Bond than the traditional L.A. hardboiled gumshoe, he’s a gentleman who favours Saville Row suits, speaks many languages and stays in a bungalow at a posh hotel.

He’s saintly, offering an Arab limo driver a referral to a doctor for his sick daughter, or financial aid to a homeless man. Incongruously, he climbs through windows, gets into scraps and visits dive bars in his evening wear. Also, he drinks copiously but never gets drunk, and seems to be celibate. Although he insists he doesn’t like hurting people, he has a talent for quick and effective violence.

As played by Farrell, who mixes an animal alertness with a childlike innocence, he has a quality that’s rather sweetly stunned. Unexpectedly, he’s a major film nerd and the prospect of working for a famous producer, whose films Sugar has memorized, is too compelling.

Also, the missing daughter, Olivia (Sydney Chandler), who has been in and out of rehab for years, reminds him of his sister, to whom something has happened. A visit to Olivia’s posh duplex apartment brings him in contact with Olivia’s half-brother,  Davey (Nate Corddry), a former child star who has taken to hanging out with dangerous people. He also meets Olivia’s former stepmom, a hard-drinking former pop star, Melanie (Amy Ryan, nicely complex) who becomes Sugar’s sidekick and confidante.

All this driving around and interviewing people about dark family secrets feels deliberately generic, with a few topical elements (a #MeToo scandal, references to cross-border human trafficking) that could be part of any Law & Order episode).

Simultaneously, there’s something weird going on here, the canted angles and the juddering flashbacks signaling some loose wires in Sugar’s perceptions. Then there’s trouble with his body: A tremor in one hand, a knife wound that keeps opening up on his arm.

As Sugar drives around L.A. In his vintage blue Corvette, his mind keeps flashing on vintage black-and-white classics (Touch of Evil, Vertigo, Sunset Boulevard, Kiss Me Deadly and many more). And who exactly is the organization Sugar and Ruby are working for? There’s a reference to someone in Japan whose “cell” has disbanded and is looking for a safe refuge. 

None of these scattered breadcrumbs are enough to allow a viewer a reasonable guess at Sugar’s backstory until a big what-the-hell? revelation at the end of Episode 6. It’s not that the idea couldn’t work, it’s just that it doesn’t.

Successful fiction, as novelist Graham Swift once wrote, depends on the “exactly judged release of information and emotion.” Sugar, in contrast, withholds information too long before it becomes a clumsy information dump. 

The effect is more irritating than disastrous. The performances are consistent and generally credible and the series’ look, glossy and fragmented, is fresh. And the backstory does sets up an interesting premise for a subsequent season.

Now if the series’ creators settle down to developing the characters, and losing the ridiculous James Bond suits, Sugar might give the L.A. detective genre a future pathway.

The first two episodes of Sugar’s eight-episode series are available on Apple TV+ on Friday, April 5 with one episode each subsequent week.