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Noir is having a moment this week, with the release of the arthouse take on Ripley on Netflix coinciding with the new Apple TV+ series Sugar, which is about a private investigator that loves old movies, has a moral code, and lots of secrets. Both are languidly paced, but both are enjoyable for different reasons.
SUGAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Shots of Tokyo in black and white. A man is cutting a hand roll in his apartment.
The Gist: The man gets a knock on the door. An American private investigator named John Sugar (Colin Farrell) is looking for a little girl. At first, the man denies it, but Farrell knows he’s lying. He eventually finds the girl, but not without getting slashed by the man before subduing him. As he returns to the hotel where he’s staying, the view turns from black and white to color.
He comes home to Los Angeles, and gets an email that legendary film producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell) wants to hire him. The next thing we see, though, he’s rolling up on a house, talking in Arabic to his driver. It’s the house of his friend and handler Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who wants him to take a break from cases, especially because he’s still having PTSD-style episodes. She’s also annoyed that Siegel reached out to him directly, and he went to see the producer.
Sugar had to do it, given how much of a film obsessive he is. Siegel is concerned that his granddaughter Olivia (Sydney Chandler), who is in recovery due to drug problems, has gone missing. Ruby wishes he didn’t take the case, but Sugar tells him he had to, because Olivia looks like a woman named Jen, which was either his wife or daughter, but is no longer in his life. Although he’s not a fan of guns or violence, Ruby persuades him to carry a gun by telling him it’s the gun Glenn Ford used in The Big Heat.
Sugar goes to Olivia’s apartment, where he’s confronted by her half-brother David (Nate Corddry), who is a well-known actor. He was asked by their father to check on her weekly, but given that he let himself and his bodyguard Kenny (Alex Hernandez) in, he is pretty sure Olivia isn’t around.
While looking around the apartment, Sugar finds pictures of Olivia with Melanie Matthews (Amy Ryan), one of her former stepmothers and a bona fide rock star. He goes to the club where the pics were taken and he sees Melanie, day drinking and very willing to talk to someone who buys the same expensive rye that’s in her glass. The two of them get along well, though Sugar tells her he can drink like a fish and not get drunk, due to a speedy metabolism. She brings him to her house and tries to have sex with him, but he tells her repeatedly, “You’re drunk; I’m not,” and leaves the house realizing he didn’t get any answers from her.
When he goes to Olivia’s car in the middle of the night — L.A. is pretty quiet overnight, despite what people think — Sugar finds a body in the trunk. He momentarily leaves it there and goes to the hotel where he lives when he’s in town. Looking through a suitcase he found at Olivia’s place, he starts to see connections between Olivia and her mother, Rachel Kaye (Natalie Alyn Lind), a young actress who died in a car accident shortly after Olivia was born in 1998.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take the noirish feel of the recently-released Ripley and cross it with the wry, movie-obsessed characters in Get Shorty (both the movie and the series), and you’ve got Sugar.
Our Take: There’s something about the low-key casualness that Sugar creator Mark Protosevich deploys during the series that we found really appealing. It could be because Farrell does such a good job establishing Sugar as a different kind of private investigator, one that has a moral code and social conscience, who would rather not use violence to solve cases but isn’t exactly a pacifist.
Fernando Meirelles, who directed the first episode, uses elements of old-style movie noir, like the spotlight fades and the languid jazzy soundtrack, and Protosevich’s sparing use of Farrell doing voice overs as Sugar, indicate that Sugar sees his world as a 1940s detective film, even though he lives in the present day. We also see brief scenes from classic films, which also speaks to Sugar’s thought process. Shots are either tight and shaky, shot at odd angles, or completely standard, but there’s no rhyme or reason to why a certain shot is deployed. Between those devices and the traumatic visions that come to him — in one, he starts bleeding profusely from the slashing wound, even though he properly closed it — we get a pretty good picture of just who John Sugar is.
He lives in a hotel because he likes being taken care of and likes talking to the people who work there. He takes the time to find out about an unhoused man and his dog, and offers to pay to have him go stay with his sister in Milwaukee. He drives a vintage Corvette because, well, it’s a hell of a beautiful car. He’s not exactly living in the past, but he sure wishes he did.
Some of the other characters we come across in this first 50 minute episode (the rest of the season’s 8 episodes are under 40 minutes) are less well defined. We know that Ruby somehow manages Sugar, but we’re not sure in what capacity just yet. “You’re my business,’ she tells him. How this arrangement came to be is something that’s left a mystery in the first episode. Another thing that’s mysterious is why Olivia’s brother Dave has his gun-toting henchman Kenny working for him; the guy is just an actor, right?
We suspect that those questions will be answered during the season. But we’re also fine with going along on this ride with Sugar. Farrell has done American characters before, but John Sugar feels like the most comfortable he’s ever been playing someone that isn’t Irish. He embodies Sugar completely, with that aforementioned streak of morality, integrity and discretion all internalized, so that he looks like the stylish but weary detective that he’s playing.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Sugar sticks a needle in his neck and injects himself with something, then lies on his back in bed. “I have to find Olivia. I have to. I have to.” he mutters. Then a spotlight fade closes; we see the moon, then a vision of Olivia as “Sugar, Sugar” starts playing.
Sleeper Star: We liked the chemistry Kirby’s character Ruby had with Sugar, as if she’s the only one he’ll generally listen to to keep his mental health relatively in check.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You’ve gotta stop following me Kenny, OK?” Sugar says. “You’re a terrible tail. I can spot you from a mile away. Ten miles away.” Ten miles?
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the languid pacing, Sugar had us engaged for the entire first episode, mainly because Colin Farrell embodies the character of John Sugar so well.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
