Farrell stars in LA noir story with love-it-or-hate-it twist
For a pop-cultural century, in words and images, Los Angeles has been depicted as a seductively alien locale not like any other place in the galaxy. Its natural disaster quotient, its sterling variety of photogenic backdrops for moral rot and a wide world of sleaze, the sun, the secrets — all of it spells camera-ready trouble in paradise.
Its strangeness was made for, and by, film noir. Here’s one example: “Sugar,” starring
Colin Farrell as a mysteriously well-off private eye specializing in missing person cases. Creator and lead writer Mark Protosevich’s slippery fish of an eight-part series owes debts all over town — to the legendary movies beloved by the title character, and to LA’s infinite capacity for new wrinkles along familiar fault lines.
We meet John Sugar (Farrell) in a black-andwhite Tokyo prologue, as he successfully if violently resolves the kidnapping and ransom case of a yakuza’s young son. Locating the missing, he murmurs in archetypal noir voiceover, makes for “a tough business. But steady.”
The rest of “Sugar” unfolds mostly in color and in Los Angeles. Sugar’s new case involves the disappearance of 25-yearold Olivia Siegel (Sydney Chandler), tarnished Hollywood royalty. She’s the daughter of movie director Bernie Siegel (Dennis Boutsikaris). Olivia’s actor mother died in a car accident in 1998. The family scion and true legend, producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), hires Sugar for the search-and-rescue job,
staying classically tightlipped about his motives, though he’s frank about his pampered offspring, notably grandson and one-time child actor David (Nate Corddry).
Clearly Sugar’s hourly rate exceeds the average gumshoe’s. When in LA, he lives in a swank hotel, meeting with his apparent agency boss Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) while tooling around town in a sleek blue Corvette. Ruby’s concerned about his health, and how this case might mess with this man’s guarded psyche. In teasing half-fragments, the series tells us Sugar’s sister too went missing, and he’s coping uneasily with the trauma.
The labyrinth takes the detective into dark corners and other brutal disappearances all over the county. Amy Ryan, who excels in the role of a Joni Mitchell-type rock legend and Bernie Siegel’s ex-wife, becomes Sugar’s confidante and sounding board. Creator Protosevich treats this character’s struggles with addiction and recovery seriously and effectively; likewise, a #MeToo scandal enveloping the Siegel family develops into more than mere topical referencing. It’s at once plausible in the context
of the story and nicely threaded in the middle episodes.
While “Sugar” strategically drip-drip-drips its hints regarding the detective’s past, and the nature of his organization’s larger mission, a reveal in Episode 6 is nutty enough to toss a fair percentage of viewers overboard. It’s a testament to the series’ strengths — strong, steady performances; a nice glare and gloss to the imagery — that it very nearly recovers from the whopper.
After watching all eight segments, I felt differently about it, more accepting. Other things bugged me more: the narrative’s wearying reliance on girls-in-torture-dungeons depravity and the wellmotivated but nonetheless indulgent reliance on snippets from dozens of Old Hollywood titles.
So it’s a bag you might call mixed. But I found a lot of it absorbing, and nearly every performance first-rate. If enough viewers go for the twist, well, the open-ended ending of “Sugar” sets up a second season with ease.
Rating: TV-MA (for violence, language, some nudity) Running time: Eight episodes, about 4:30 total How to watch: Apple TV+