Getting a TV show made isn't easy. OK, so you've got an interesting idea and some good scripts – but a network or streaming platform will have many further questions. How much will it cost to make, which age/demographic will enjoy it, can it be distilled in a grabby one-line summary, could it recoup investment by running to multiple seasons? Nobody's going to take a punt on your kooky pet project and risk losing money.
At least that's the theory, but Apple TV seems happy to commission shows having ticked none of the above boxes. Pound for pound – that is, ignoring the overwhelming volume of Netflix shows – it's probably the best streamer in the game, having gambled and won on Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, The Studio, For All Mankind and Widow's Bay. But it also has a stable of oddball charmers that work in a moseying sort of way – Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed and Margo's Got Money Troubles being two recent ones – and a slew of baffling misfires like Government Cheese and Hello Tomorrow! that have popped up, done a thing nobody understood and disappeared again. You don't know what you'll get with a new Apple show, but it's likely to be something nobody else would green-light, and they'd often be right.
The Return of John Sugar
Strutting around just above the duds is Sugar, starring Colin Farrell as Los Angeles private investigator John Sugar. In season one he probed the case of a missing young woman, turning up links between her loved ones and criminals of all stripes, with an air of detached melancholy accentuated by Farrell's wistful voiceover and the regular homages to the show's obvious inspiration, film noir.
As well as shooting with a low or tilted camera and presenting LA as a city of desperate loners, Sugar included clips from classic noirs and other aesthetically similar black-and-white films, on the lead character's TV screen at home or just spliced directly into the action. Farrell's PI is a subscriber to American Cinematographer magazine who drives a classic 1960s Corvette. An indulgence for old-soul cineastes, then? Not entirely: three-quarters of the way through the season, the show casually revealed that – spoiler alert, although it's not as much of a spoiler as you'd assume – John Sugar is an alien who is concealing his real, bright blue self and posing as a handsome human in a perfectly tailored suit.
And so, with our eyebrows still not fully descended two years later, we rejoin Farrell for season two, to find the whole extraterrestrial business pushed to the periphery. A quick spurt of housekeeping establishes that John Sugar is back in Tinseltown, alone and vaguely troubled by his missing sister on an ongoing basis. He also remains dedicated in his daily life to taking on the hopeless cases that other investigators would ignore, such as the disappearance of a Korean boxer's feckless brother.
A Luxurious Labyrinth of Noir
To the seedy, forgotten parts of town we travel, with the show's fetish for distressed urban beauty as pronounced as ever: it loves the peeling paint on the front of a closed shop, or a wide road at dusk, cutting through a gnarled hotchpotch of concrete between low-rise neighbourhoods. Sugar sweeps around this landscape in his pristine car with the top down, laconically hunting for clues in a pool hall (a clip of Paul Newman in The Hustler plays) and a boxing gym (Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall), before retreating to the nostalgic Hollywood glamour of the five-star hotel he's adopted as his home. Here, the TV in his room shows Ida Lupino in Road House singing One for My Baby, her lit cigarette perched cheekily on top of her piano.
John Sugar not being human is just another way in which he's a disconnected observer of a city where everyone's disconnected from each other, but it does give the show another layer to its audiovisual collage: as well as the film excerpts, we can now cut to soothing shots of cerulean galaxies, while the narration has progressed from gnomic to cosmic. “Everything comes to an end,” muses Farrell, as nothing of note happens. “Sooner than you think, sometimes. From the side suns on Andromeda to the terramorphs on Paloma, everything dies.” Bogie never got lines like that.
We are lost in another luxurious Apple labyrinth, but not unhappily so. Every moment of Sugar is divine to look at, while the concept of the protagonist's main superpowers being weary kindness and naive sweetness, despite his alien biology affording him actual superpowers, continues to bewilder and amuse. Each episode is a half-hour haze suffused with Sugar's sad, sleepy vibe. This show could only be on Apple – it's another world in there.
Sugar is on Apple TV now.
