Colin Farrell’s Brilliant Detective Show Is the Antidote to Every Antihero Drama
John Sugar—the private investigator played by Colin Farrell in Apple TV+’s splendid, stylish new detective series, Sugar—lives in L.A., drives a pristine vintage Corvette the color of a swimming pool, and loves old movies. He wouldn’t be the first guy to get into the profession under the influence of Hollywood’s romantic portrayal of detectives. From its sun-bleached credits to its smoggy saxophone and moody voiceover, Sugar resembles many classics of the genre, especially any story featuring Raymond Chandler’s iconic hard-boiled Los Angeles PI, Philip Marlowe.
The case Sugar takes on in the show’s first season is classic Chandler, too: The detective is summoned to the mansion of a wealthy old man who wants him to find a missing girl, his wayward granddaughter. Sugar is supposed to be taking a break, but he can’t resist the call because the old man is Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell, perfectly cast), a movie producer whose films number among Sugar’s favorites. The quest to find Olivia Siegel (Sydney Chandler, no relation to Raymond) ushers the detective into the company of Hollywood royalty—which is to say Hollywood types. There’s Jonathan Siegel’s less accomplished but still arrogant middle-aged son, Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris), and Olivia’s even less talented half brother, David, a washed-up former child star (played with magnificent petulance by Nate Corddry) who’s trying to relaunch his career by reprising the role that made his name. It might work, if his dad can buy the silence of the multiple women he’s sexually harassed and assaulted in the past.
Sugar, however, is no lowly gumshoe in the Marlowe vein. He specializes in one task: finding missing persons. And he must be pretty good at it, given that the series opens with him on the job in Tokyo at the behest of a yakuza boss whose grandson has been kidnapped. Sugar wears exquisitely tailored Savile Row suits and lives in a bungalow at a hotel resembling the Chateau Marmont. He drinks very expensive scotch and subscribes to Sight and Sound. Instead of a wisecracking secretary, he has Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), a Brit who lives in a gorgeous Silver Lake cottage and seems to be in charge of him in some way. Is she his manager? Handler? And if so, who does Ruby work for? She scolds Sugar for blowing off his vacation and orders him to see a doctor, which seems like a good idea, given that every so often he appears to suffer a minor seizure.
Sugar proceeds along these two tracks: the pleasingly familiar sleuthing after Olivia through Hollywood high (and low) life, and the mystery of what’s going on with Sugar. Olivia’s father and half brother pooh-pooh her grandfather’s concern, insisting that she’s probably on a bender despite reports from her friends that she’d finally gotten sober. Along the way, Sugar finds a corpse in the trunk of a car, encounters a very scary gang leader, and meets Melanie (Amy Ryan), who is one of Bernie’s ex-wives and a former rock star.
The rapport between Sugar and Melanie forms the heart of Sugar. Like (perhaps) Olivia, Melanie has been sober but recently fell off the wagon, which seems to have some connection to Olivia’s disappearance and the death of another young woman. Ryan’s Melanie is worn, but soft rather than rough, a woman polished down to her essential goodness when life might have made her a cynic. “You’re not a douche,” she tells Sugar after they meet, contrary to what she expects of a man in a fancy suit. She has a point. Melanie possesses what, in Sugar, amounts to the ultimate investigative ability: She’s a great judge of character. “There’s more to you than meets the eye,” she tells Sugar an hour or two after meeting him. “You have secrets—and you keep them.”
He’s definitely not a douche. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Chandler famously wrote in his essay on detective fiction, “The Simple Art of Murder.” The Big Sleep, after which Sugar is patterned, features the recurring motif of the knight. But truth be told, while Chandler considered his own detective an exemplar (“He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor”), Philip Marlowe was kind of mean, especially when it came to women and Black people.
Sugar, on the other hand, is chivalry personified. He offers the kidnapper in the opening scene a head start to get away before he notifies the yakuza chief. He’s kind and respectful to chauffeurs, hotel maids, and a homeless man to whom he offers airfare back home. He gently rebuffs a drunken pass from Melanie—something, to be fair, Marlowe also does in The Big Sleep, but from a much less appealing woman. He seems able to talk to anyone, from Olivia’s partying girlfriends to David’s imperious mother, in their own language. (This is in addition to speaking Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish.) “I don’t like hurting people,” Sugar insists over and over again, despite having chosen a profession entangled with pain. He’s less hard-boiled than liquefied, protean. Snippets from classic movies are interjected at moments in the investigation that echo them, suggesting just how much they’ve shaped Sugar’s sense of himself.
Farrell’s performance has a restrained, melancholy tenderness that suffuses the series. His Sugar is not just a man of honor but a genuinely good man, something so rare in the lives of the people he meets while searching for Olivia that most of them don’t know quite what to make of him. He’s the unshowy antidote to every antihero in premium cable TV, proof that decency doesn’t have to be boring, especially in a world where it’s extremely unusual. 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.
