Sugar review – Colin Farrell’s detective show is a luxurious labyrinth of noir
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- Sugar season 2 on Apple TV+ picks up two years after season 1's reveal that John Sugar is an alien disguised as a human, with the extraterrestrial angle now 'pushed to the periphery' in favor of a missing-person case.
- Colin Farrell reprises the role of John Sugar, a Los Angeles PI who still takes on hopeless cases other investigators ignore — season 2 opens with the disappearance of a Korean boxer's feckless brother.
- Apple TV+ is framed as the only major streamer willing to greenlight shows that defy conventional pitch-deck logic, with hits including Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, and The Studio alongside baffling misfires like Government Cheese and Hello Tomorrow!.
- The show's noir aesthetic carries over with half-hour episodes, a pristine 1960s Corvette, and spliced-in clips from The Hustler, The Harder They Fall, and Road House starring Ida Lupino.
- Reviewer notes that John Sugar's defining 'superpowers' are 'weary kindness and naive sweetness' — not the alien abilities his biology actually affords him — a contrast the review finds both bewildering and amusing.
- Farrell's narration has escalated from 'gnomic to cosmic,' with lines like 'From the side suns on Andromeda to the terramorphs on Paloma, everything dies' delivered over shots of cerulean galaxies.
Why it matters: Apple's pattern of greenlighting projects that no other streamer would touch — from Severance-caliber hits to misfires like Government Cheese — means a slow, half-hour alien noir with minimal plot survives despite defying every conventional commissioning metric. For viewers, Sugar's commitment to melancholy mood over narrative momentum is a dealbreaker-or-delight proposition that only Apple seems willing to bankroll.
