'Sugar' Is Stylish, But What Is This Story Even About?

The AppleTV+ series Sugar is home to some of the finest vibes currently available on streaming. A present-day noir set in Los Angeles, Sugar is an incredibly stylish and handsome series telling the story of John Sugar (Colin Farrell), a private investigator who’s taken a job searching for a young woman named Olivia Siegel (Sydney Chandler) who has recently gone missing. With Olivia being the black sheep of her Hollywood power-family, her father Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris) and her half-brother Davy (Nate Corddry) seem a bit too comfortable hand-waving her absence as another one of her benders. The elder Siegel patriarch Jonathan (James Cromwell) appears to have a closer relationship with Olivia and stands out as one of the few friends and loved ones who actively wants her found. Melanie Mackintosh (Amy Ryan), a former rockstar and Olivia’s stepmother who worked with Olivia at a women’s shelter, is another one of those few. Rounding out the cast of this mystery is Ruby (the newly mononym’d Kirby), a mysterious and well-dressed woman who acts as John’s handler and is very concerned about John taking this case.

Sugar looks great, from the perfectly crisp lighting to the sumptuous interiors to the chic clothes. It’s shot stylishly and regularly splices moments from old Hollywood films. The magic of that choice is in how judiciously it’s deployed; the clips are very brief and well-aligned with the themes so that instead of feeling like filler, these moments bolster the scenes they’re dropped in. The cast channels the classic gumshoe story feeling without leaning into caricature or camp. Farrell crushes the titular role, playing John like a do-gooder with a keen sense of right and wrong that hides some gnawing secret. The occasional voice-over from John is used just enough to further invoke a classic noir feeling without becoming a crutch. The vibes are truly top-notch and Sugar makes it feel like you’re experiencing the classiest, cooles whodunnit available. I’m a fan of Sugar and I’m enjoying the hell out of the ride it’s sent me on, but I have a pressing question: what is this story actually about?

I understand that John’s mission is to find Olivia and that as a detective story, that’s all we need, but Sugar has other weirder irons in the narrative fire. For example, we learn that John and Ruby are members of a larger organization called the Cosmopolitan Polyglot Society, the members of which Ruby seems to manage in some capacity. The members all appear to have taken different day-jobs, but are generally directed to observe and report. We see Ruby report to someone named Miller with whom she has a very opaque conversation that implies some connection between the CPS, Olivia, and a murdered woman who was associated with Olivia. They’re very afraid John may discover something about the methods they’re engaging in, implying that kidnapping and murder have fallen under the CPS purview.

As for John, as magnetically performed as he may be, the man is a cipher, almost to the point of parody. He shoots up with some mysterious intravenous drug to sleep and the show seems almost pointedly coy about its identity. Even when he goes to the mysterious CPS doctor Vickers, it’s mentioned only as “intravenous drugs.” John can drink and drink and never get drunk, ever, for no reason he gives or explains. Ruby comments many times on his do-gooding instincts and Melanie comments on his uncommon kindness, often with the connotation of disbelief. It all adds up to the portrait of a person with much more below the surface than what viewers or characters on the show can see. Melanie prods at this often, going so far as to plead towards the end of the fourth episode, “Tell me your secret, John.” After a long pause during which the screen cuts to black, we hear John’s echoed whisper, “I can’t.”

I understand that Sugar means to parcel out its information slowly so it can keep the story tense and mysterious and I understand that to do that, a lot of information needs to be held back from the audience. The trouble I’m seeing is that at the glacial pace the series trickles out revelations, there’s not a lot of story movement and it feels as though that should be gelling more by now, the halfway point of an 8-episode series. Each episode gives you a tiny sliver of new information laid elegantly in a well-designed box, but it leaves the viewers confused for too long. We should know more about our protagonist by this point or at least understand him as more than a collection of intriguing traits. The CPS is elusive, but they give us enough tantalizing hints to have an idea of what they’re about. It’s important to remember that it could always be worse. At least it’s not Mr. & Mrs. Smith which was so preoccupied with airing out dating grievances that we never got an idea of what the spy agency actually was.

Given what’s been hidden so far, the show doesn’t want the viewers to know who John really is, what the CPS is, and what their methods are for just yet. To me, this indicates that they’re all tied to the same secret such that one of those things couldn’t be answered without spoiling the reveal of the others. I’ve heard some theories about what that might be, but for my money the most intriguing one is that John and the CPS are aliens who are tasked with learning human behavior on Earth. It would explain quite a bit, especially the needle drugs (maybe they address some alien biological needs?), John’s inability to be drunk, and maybe even the movie clips which could’ve been used by aliens to prime themselves on human media and behavior. It would explain why John seems to be an archetypal gumshoe with a heart of gold if he picked it up from old movies. From a writing perspective, it also makes sense why you’d want to hold your biggest reveal back, especially if that reveal has implications over all elements of the show.

It’s not an innately bad decision to hold back a big reveal like that, but it does make choosing when to lift the veil much more heavy. It wouldn’t do to push the reveal too soon and then potentially suck the tension out of the rest of the series. Sugar just needs to find something else to show us in the meantime. As is, the show does a lot of retreading (of character motivations, of scenes, of conversations) and as well-made as it all is, it’s starting to feel inert. With each episode made of very watchable padding around a tiny sliver of plot movement, I wonder if Sugar would’ve benefited from being a feature-length movie instead of an 8-episode series.

Sugar has delicious vibes, but after four episodes it feels like it’s spinning its wheels a bit. Watching those elegantly shot wheels spin with flair is enjoyable, but I’m left with the deflating feeling of reaching the end of an hour-long episode barely any further into the plot than when I began. I’m staying with Sugar because it’s a great ride, I just hope it gives the audience something else to chew on while we get there.