Sugar review: Colin Farrell is a smooth operator with plenty of swagger to spare in Apple’s spectacular detective show

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Sugar himself is an enigma. He loves movies. They’re a bit of an obsession, he says. Often, it seems like he’s emulating his favourite gumshoes, giving his own tale a hard-boiled voiceover. His eyes light up when he’s presented with Glenn Ford’s pistol from The Big Heat. But we’re first introduced to him mid-assignment in Tokyo, Japan. He locates the missing daughter of a Yakuza, begrudgingly beats up the man who kidnapped her, accepts a large sum of money for his services and returns home to Los Angeles. He’s immediately hired by a legendary Hollywood film producer to locate his missing granddaughter, a young woman prone to going AWOL for long stretches of time.

This prologue serves a handful of purposes — the first and most obvious one is to familiarise the viewer with Meirelles distinct storytelling style, and then to convey basic but crucial information about Sugar as a person. He’s a no-nonsense guy with a curious relationship to violence; he speaks several languages, and is clearly very good at his job; but he’s also unmistakably human.

Sugar might live out of a hotel suite, drive a vintage Chevrolet and wear bespoke suits, but in the first episode itself, we watch him strike a genuine bond with a homeless man and his dog. It’s the sort of scene a regular television show wouldn’t have ever dreamt of finding time for, purely because it brings the ‘plot’ to a halt. But in doing so, it provides more information about Sugar than any expository scene ever could. A lesser show would’ve had some acquaintance of his recite a long list of Sugar’s accomplishments for our benefit — “He served in ‘Nam, he once killed a man a fork, etc” — and it would’ve been grating.

Episode one is a masterclass in pilot-direction. It’s gripping, inventive, and Farrell is fire in the central role. It’s a restrained performance, but he’s able to hit all the right notes — guilt, determination, vulnerability, sorrow, but most importantly, decency. It’s vital that we see Sugar as an inherently nice person — a white knight by way of Billy Wilder — and the show goes out of its way to stop us from wondering if he’s legit or not, or questioning his motivations. And that’s because it wants to divert our attention to the grand ‘reveal’ that it’s building towards. This reveal is separate from the plot resolution, whose success will depend on how well you’ve been vibing with the show thus far. A spoonful of sugar certainly does help the medicine go down, because the ‘twist’ might actually be a bit too bitter of a pill for some to swallow.

Sugar builds towards it methodically, not manically — the pace in the middle episodes slackens to a degree, even as the clues around who Sugar really is become more pronounced. Is he actually all alone? Does he really have no family? Who is the sister Jen that he keeps talking about? There must be more to his repeated denouncement of violence. The answers arrive at the end of episode six, by which time some people understandably have been thrown off. And even though the show doesn’t transform fundamentally after this big twist, everything that happens next is coloured by the new information; everything that has happened so far is re-contextualised.

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As the chips begin to fall in place, wondrous new avenues also open up. The first season is perfectly packaged — a story with a carefully crafted beginning, middle, and end; one that feels complete, and completely satisfying. But there’s a sense that Sugar could transform into something else entirely in the future, as it digs into the more philosophical corners of its premise. What does it mean to be human; is ugliness — both moral and physical — necessary to survive? Strap in.

Sugar
Creator – Mark Protosevich
Cast – Colin Farrell, Amy Ryan, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Anna Gunn, Nate Corddry, Dennis Boutsikaris, James Cromwell
Rating – 4.5/5