Sugar | review by Rafe McGregor

Sugar. Apple TV+, 8 episodes, April 2024, £8.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Genre-bending neo-noir.

John Sugar (played by Colin Farrell) is a man with a mission, a private investigator who is very good at one thing and one thing only: finding missing persons. He is also a film buff and his reflections on the progress (or lack thereof) of his cases are cut with shots from classics of the Golden Age of Film Noir (as far as I could tell, anyway), which must have cost Apple a fair bit (I suppose they can afford it). Sugar loves movies so much, he might almost have used them to teach himself his trade, in a similar manner to that in which his friend Henry (played by Jason Butler Harner) might have taught himself to be an academic by reading campus novels.

For me, Farrell has taken over from Denzel Washington as the archetypal private eye or latter-day (urban) cowboy, a tough guy with a code and perhaps even a heart of gold if you can penetrate the layers of muscle. Like Washington, I never took to Farrell’s onscreen persona (just a little too smug for me), but he is an actor of such versatility that I was soon swayed by his performances in Miami Vice (2006), London Boulevard (2010), and True Detective 2 (2015), just as Washington blew me away in Out of Time (2003), Man on Fire (2004), and Déjà Vu (2006).

Why am I reviewing a neo-noir television series for TQF? Because, like Tony Scott’s wonderful Déjà Vu, Sugar has a genre-bending twist, albeit one that is revealed late in the series. (I won’t say which genre, so as to avoid spoilers, but you can be sure it’s one of science fiction, fantasy, or horror.) There are in fact two twists, an unusual change of category and a more common, but nonetheless delightful, reversal of fortune as the narrative charges to its conclusion. Does the change of category work? I’m not sure. It certainly didn’t ruin what had gone before, but ultimately I found it a little gratuitous. Meaning that the series would have been at least as good without it and perhaps better.

The case itself is standard PI fare, with Sugar hired to find the missing grandchild of movie mogul Jonathan Siegel (played by James Cromwell). Farrell is at his best since HBO’s True Detective 2 and there are outstanding performances by Kirby (formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste, playing Sugar’s handler, Ruby) and Amy Ryan (playing Melanie Matthews, a retired rock star). The denouement is not at all predictable and even rather tense so in spite of a lost star for squeezing two genres into one narrative, I’d say it’s definitely worth watching. ***