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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
23
Mixed:
12
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
RogerEbert.comJun 19, 2026
Season 2 Review:
A more refined and bolder version of the show that premiered in 2024. .... The editing and pacing of the first couple of episodes may feel frenetic, but as we go back and forth between the past and present, the story that shapes up in season two is one of this year’s most engaging.
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Apr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Splendid, stylish. .... Farrell’s performance has a restrained, melancholy tenderness that suffuses the series. .... Sugar’s sweetness is a kind of superpower, a wild card in a world where almost everyone else can be expected to behave badly. That’s not the most unusual thing about him, but it’s the thing that makes him so much worth watching.
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RogerEbert.comMar 29, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“Sugar” feels like a show that is destined for success. Farrell’s performance is one of the best of the year, and hopefully he’s able to inhabit this character for many more seasons. The way the series and its titular character both struggle with ideas of violence, shame and complicity is enthralling from start to finish, and proves that while “Sugar” isn’t necessarily reinventing the genre, it's bending it to its will.
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Screen RantJun 19, 2026
Season 2 Review:
Some viewers may have disregarded this show entirely after the sci-fi twist, but largely due to Farrell's star power and amicable nature, Sugar season 2 impressively pulled itself out of a narrative hole to provide Apple TV with a detective franchise it can rely on long-term.
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Jun 19, 2026
Season 2 Review:
While there’s nothing particularly novel about that plot, it pulls you along, and the series as a whole is orchestrated to make one care about the characters and worry over their fates. Vivid minor characters — there are pro turns from Shea Whigham, Laura San Giacomo and Mireille Enos — make the story live. All in all, a good meal that leaves no bitter aftertaste.
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Apr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The hints of spy or conspiracy thriller that waft around the edges of the detective story become more insistent until they break into the open fairly late in the season, in a reveal that is most likely to sharply divide opinions. .... Yet to its credit, it also remains an L.A. noir, in mood and morals, to the end. You have to admire it, if only for Protosevich’s chutzpah in trying to pull it off.
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Apr 4, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Mr. Farrell and Ms. Ryan, first-rate actors, may not be Nick and Nora, but they make a memorable pair of fractured detectives. .... The troubling character is Ruby, though a viewer will have to stick with eight episodes to find out why. It will be easy. It's the stuff bad dreams are made of.
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Apr 4, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Amid a deluge of streaming content, sometimes it’s a pleasure simply to come across something that manages to make the familiar seem original. “Sugar” isn’t flawless, but the sweetness of that sensation, to borrow from a certain old movie, feels like the stuff dreams are made of.
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ColliderApr 2, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Despite the story becoming a tad muddled in its final installments, its bold plot twist is creatively admirable. Sugar is both a tribute to the classic film noir that is almost all but extinct in modern Hollywood and your next TV obsession — as long as you prepare for the rug to be pulled out from right under your feet.
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The TelegraphMar 27, 2024
Apr 5, 2024
Apr 2, 2024
Jun 19, 2026
Season 2 Review:
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.
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Apr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It’s unfortunate to see a series with the scope of Sugar turn out to be a textbook example of style over substance. The reveal comes far too late in the game to ensure audiences will see the show through, and for those who have, the lack of resolution leaves a bitter aftertaste when there’s no guarantee of a second season.
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Apr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The version that Sugar mostly pretends to be for six episodes would probably do just fine without the big twist. (It helps that most of the installments hover around 35 minutes in length, keeping the story from bogging down in the way so many streaming series do.) For that matter, the show that Sugar turns out to be is interesting, too. It just completely undercuts what came before, while also arriving much too late to feel fully-formed when Protosevich decides it’s time to turn his cards face up.
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Apr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It’s that most tantalizing of shows—one that you feel should be good, that has you constantly leaning in expecting it to be good, but just never quite gets there. In other words, it’s a tease; it takes you a while to quit, but by the third or fourth episode, you start to realize there’s no heart.
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The PlaylistJun 19, 2026
Season 2 Review:
Farrell really is remarkable, helping sell some of the show’s most emotional moments. But “Sugar” struggles to maintain interest beyond the big ideas it introduces, too often lost in genre mechanics when it should be spending more time getting to know its supplementary characters.
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Mar 27, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The problem isn’t that the twist in Sugar doesn’t work. It’s actually quite intriguing. But almost all of that intrigue will have to wait for a second season, because although the twist is actually the premise of the overall series, the coyness is the point of the first season. And it’s that coyness that threatens to kill Sugar, or at least to drain most of the interest from the familiar and frequently bland foregrounded plot.
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IndieWireApr 4, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The big twist isn’t enough to overcome unwelcome cliches — spare yourself the weightless pontificating about what makes us human and how violence begets violence (complete with some late-arriving and pretty severe misogyny) — but it does make clear that if this project had to be made, the first season should’ve been condensed into a pilot episode (or even a movie).
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Apr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
For most of the show, Sugar comes off as unconvincing wish fulfillment. If “Sugar” were able to sell its 11th-hour hairpin turn, it would need to earn our buy-in first through a more grounded portrait of a lost, searching soul. Instead, the show feels detached from reality even before it takes a turn for the surreal.
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