Apple TV has a strange business strategy in which it will greenlight and renew any moderately successful series, as long as it has a few famous names attached. Unlike Prime Video, which has embraced being its own studio, Apple’s first and foremost a tech company, and has the disposable income for its creative endeavors to be little more than a side hustle. Although Apple TV has cornered the market for science fiction shows with Severance, Silo, Foundation, and Murderbot, among others, Sugar is by far the weirdest of their genre exercises because it didn’t immediately promote itself as being high-concept. The show was marketed as a nostalgic noir series in the style of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, only for a twist to reveal the presence of extraterrestrials.
Although some of Colin Farrell’s star vehicles (The Banshees of Inisherin, After Yang) worked out stronger than others (The Ballad of a Small Player, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey), he’s consistently made enough interesting performative choices to justify at least one watch. At first, Sugar seemed like Farrell’s opportunity to ape Robert Mitchum; while he’s starred in investigative crime thrillers like Pride and Glory and Miami Vice in the past, Sugar is littered with so many references to the Golden Age of Hollywood it’s impossible to pass it up. Farrell’s moody, yet sensitive portrayal of the detective John Sugar could have been nothing but an homage to the personalities of these classical private eyes, but Sugar has a justification for its titular character’s emotional unreadability; Sugar’s a member of an alien race that monitors Earth.
The first season of Sugar awkwardly saddled this revelation at a time in which it could only answer immediate questions. Sugar’s reluctance to commit himself to his love interest Melania (Amy Ryan) made more sense, and his obsession with classic Hollywood movies was justified because a visitor to Earth would learn about its culture through the silver screen. The question faced by Sugar Season 2 is whether this was simply a quirk used to distinguish what’s essentially a high-concept procedural, or if Sugar had any deeper thoughts on mankind’s search for answers. The answer is somewhere in-between; Sugar is, aliens aside, the closest that contemporary television will get to the dime-store novels of Dashiell Hammett, but it also has something to say about how mankind has doomed itself through incuriosity.
It was only through the perspective of an outsider that the version of Los Angeles in Sugar would ever seem wondrous. The city’s grown so disreputable as a result of cynicism and anti-Hollywood sentiments that only someone fully enamored with the magic of cinema, like Sugar, could revel in the place where Chinatown and Sunset Blvd. were shot. Since moviegoing is, for the first time since the 1930s, been ousted from its place within the monoculture, any series would have to develop a specific reason for why it contains so many references to the work of Billy Wilder, John Ford, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Apple TV’s two best shows have taken different approaches ; The Studio is the insider’s series about the the industry, whereas Sugar is from the perspective of someone who learned about humanity through cinema, and has conflated the two.
Sugar is an immigrant’s story, but there’s a reason it chose to make its main character from a different planet. Sugar has, in a way, fulfilled the dream and curse faced by any migrant because he can blend in with the dominant culture; thanks to the advanced technology of his alien race, he can speak any language, and can appear to be a member of the dominant culture and look like Colin Farrell (even if, to date, the show has not acknowledged that the real Farrell exists within the world of Sugar). There are some clever allusions to the defining archetypes within the genre, namely Sugar’s alien metabolism making it impossible for him to get drunk, which is something Spade and Marlowe wouldn’t have been able to avoid.
The main theme of Sugar Season 2 is relative familiarity, in the sense that outsiders can feel connected to the dominant culture through direct familial bonds, even if they don’t assimilate. Sugar’s case is to investigate the disappearance of Ji Moon (Raymond Lee), the brother of the underground boxer Danny (Jin Ha). A boxer mixed up in the wrong crowd is a noir trope, Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss just one example, but the idea of one sibling involved in an illicit practice for the sake of their kin has relevance to Sugar himself; although Sugar has had to give up on any human relationships he’s formed at the point that he must reveal his secret, he’s been on a seemingly doomed quest to find his sister. Sugar is smart enough to keep its protagonist isolated from his fellow aliens for over the first half of the final season, which made the search for his only known blood relative feel even more hopeless.
The shagginess of Sugar’s first season is chipped away in the second once because the show has figured out the key to its protagonist's turmoil. It's the mission to find his sister that has made him feel even more human, and more isolated; he might be able to make positive changes within the lives of his clients, but he’s prevented from sticking around for a meaningful amount of time. Cycling out the ensemble on a seasonal basis is refreshing, especially for a series that has found compelling actors willing to go toe-to-toe with Farrell; highlights of Season 2 are On Swift Horses’ Sasha Calle as a streetwise hustler, and Better Call Saul’s Tony Dalton as a corrupt lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department.