Sugar

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.