The first season of the Apple TV detective thriller Sugar had one of the most out-of-left-field twists we’ve ever seen (though we kinda called it two episodes before we saw it). One of the problems with the twist is that it changed the show from a noirish detective series that was a love letter to Los Angeles and old Hollywood to… something else entirely. Can the show go back to that noirish love letter detective series vibe in Season 2?
SUGAR SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “Planet Earth. I stayed behind. I said goodbye to Ruby and… and I stayed,” says the voice of John Sugar (Colin Farrell) as we see scenes from a chaotic city that’s definitely not Los Angeles.
The Gist: Sugar truly did stay behind, as his group of friends went home, which was also definitely not Los Angeles. He went in search of his friend Henry (Jason Butler Harner), who seems to know the whereabouts of John’s sister Djen (Maeve Whalen). But as he tragically finds out, that leads to a very dead end and the realization that he may never find her, and now he’s all alone amongst the people of Earth.
Back in Los Angeles, things have been slow for the private investigator. But he does end up getting a call from a boxer named Danny Moon (Jin Ha). His older brother Ji Moon (Raymond Lee), also a boxer, has gone missing. Danny plays Sugar the last voicemail Ji left, where Ji seemed to be in distress and speaking in ways that felt very final.
Sugar starts his investigation in Koreatown, which leads him to meet a woman named Val (Sasha Calle), who helps him — for a price — get his vintage Corvette back after it’s stolen outside a pool hall. He also gets information about one of the last people who saw Ji, a nurse at a local hospital who helped him steal drugs from her department’s pharmacy.
In the meantime, Sugar uses a communication device to see if anyone else that’s like him is out there, anywhere on the planet. He closes on a new house in the Hollywood hills, which not only means he’s out of the hotel bungalow, but he has a good view of the mansion of the senator father of serial killer Ryan Pavich (Cameron Cowperthwaite). Sugar thinks the senator had something to do with exposing his friends, killing some of them, and causing the rest to escape.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At the beginning of the first season two years ago, we compared Sugar, created by Mark Protosevich with Sam Catlin as the Season 2 showrunner, to noirish series like Get Shorty and Ripley, though by the end of that season, we weren’t quite sure exactly what we could compare the show to.
Our Take: OK, we’re going to stop playing coy about the twist that happened in the sixth episode of Sugar‘s eight-episode first season, especially because it was two years ago, so SPOILERS AHEAD!
The revelation that Sugar was an alien who was there with his fellow aliens, including Ruby (Kirby) and Henry, to “observe” humans certainly changed the nature of the show. It went from a pure noir piece about a hardscrabble private investigator obsessed with Hollywood history to… something else. Was it sci-fi? Maybe. A thriller? Perhaps. But what it didn’t do was give any satisfactory answers about Sugar and his “people,” and who might have been hunting them.
Given what we thought the second season was going to be, where Sugar tries to find Henry and get answers about the whereabouts of his sister Djen, we were shocked when that part of the story more or less resolves itself before the show’s too-cool animated opening credits roll.
So… what are we going to get in the second season? Sugar solving another missing-person case and calling into the void to see if any of his fellow people are around? Is Ji Moon’s disappearance going to tie into the greater conspiracy that forced his friends to flee the planet?
We hope that the season is about something approaching the latter question we asked. After the first season twist, seeing Sugar rolling around LA in his bitchin’ ‘Vette while thinking of clips from various classic films and hearing his voice overs talk how lonely he is and how human he’s becoming would feel like a backwards creative step for the show.
Performance Worth Watching: Farrell completely embodies Sugar once again, including the pervading loneliness that he is enduring because of his choice to stay behind and try to find his sister Djen.
Sex And Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: As he holds a Polaroid of himself and Djen at the Eiffel Tower and watches The Harder They Fall, we hear Sugar’s voice over say, “I have to be strong. Be good. I have to stay busy, or else I could end up like Henry, losing my mind, too.”
Sleeper Star: We’re intrigued by Sasha Calle as the plucky Val. Laura Donnelly plays Charlotte, someone who might make Sugar feel less alone. And Tony Dalton plays Ray Vega, who may help or hurt Sugar’s investigation.
Most Pilot-y Line: It’s fascinating that the nurse who was helping Ji steal drugs at her hospital knew exactly which port on the Ethernet switch on her desk was for the camera, that the camera was the only one looking at the pharmacy, and that when it went down, no alerts went off.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We still like a lot about Sugar, including Farrell’s perormance as well as the show’s film noir look and feel, but after the first season’s revelations, the show needs to have something more than just a missing-person mystery to make it not feel like it’s going backwards.
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.