Sugar

“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.

Sugar humanizes its villains without ever losing sight of their villainy and gives us a hero who fully deserves his place alongside the likes of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade.

Sleek, witty, and satisfyingly twisty, it's an engrossing new mystery for lovers of the genre and a wonderful showcase for star Colin Farrell.

Apple TV+’s Sugar is a stylish throwback to classic film noir, with a compelling turn from star Colin Farrell.

The second episode also has a number of evocatively shot scenes. But the character development on this episode (which runs ten minutes shorter than the premiere) is equally effective. This is especially true of Ryan’s Melanie.

Despite the languid pacing, Sugar had us engaged for the entire first episode, mainly because Colin Farrell embodies the character of John Sugar so well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The beats are familiar – deliberately so – but the performances are strong, particularly Nate Corddry as Olivia’s stepbrother, a former child star trying to make his comeback as a talentless, chinless adult. No one outdoes Farrell, however.

I found a lot of it absorbing, and nearly every performance first-rate. Did I buy it? Uh, most of it? None of it? Enough of it? Something like that, yes. If enough viewers go for the twist, well, the open-ended ending of “Sugar” sets up a second season with ease.

The show bobs, weaves, and eventually turns, establishing itself as something quite like one of Farrell’s finest performances, In Bruges, and also as something, as contrived as the notion may seem, like Los Angeles itself. Nothing is quite what it seems.

Despite falling apart in its last few episodes— the suspension of disbelief shattered, and the series even feeling like a bit of a betrayal— there’s still much to love and recommend before “Sugar” goes off the rails.

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.

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.

The show that Sugar eventually becomes is original, weird, and has huge potential. It’s just very odd that it takes six episodes to reveal itself.

Things may end on a cliffhanger that leaves the door open for further seasons, but any appetite for a return engagement is undone by the sour taste left by Sugar’s central surprise.

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.

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.

Sugar could have been – especially with a little script-polishing – at least an honourable addition to the genre. As it is, it’s nothing at all.

A slow first half contrasts an over-stacked and rushed ending, with the series ultimately trying to do too much. Sugar loses its identity along the way, a surprising result considering how strong that identity was at the outset.

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).