You’ll need a spoonful of medicine to help Apple TV’s ludicrous Sugar go down.
When future TV historians point to the death knell of Hollywood’s obsession with “prestige TV”, Apple TV’s new seriesmust be a target. The eight-part noir series has all the rote ingredients – an Oscar-nominated art-house auteur behind the camera, a respected A-lister as its lead, even a slick title sequence to open each episode – and they’re all in service of such boggling inanity that you’ll immediately rewatch the whole thing in bug-eyed shock.
Like any private dick, Sugar’s got his own reason for doing the job; sometime in the past his sister went missing, so he searches for others as spiritual retribution. So when he’s hired by Jonathan Siegel , the legendary patriarch of a Hollywood dynasty, to find his missing granddaughter Olivia, Sugar dives obsessively into a conspiracy that stretches through Hollywood’s sordid NDA-curtain, political cover-ups and sex-trafficking criminal gangs.
So far, so familiar – which is the point. As a director, Meirelles is a child in a sandpit, indulging in a genre’s shared romance and language – he plays with noir’s infamous angles, exposures, shadows, jump cuts and, notably, with actual film footage from noir cinema’s golden age, black-and-white footage of Robert Mitchum inand so on, interspersed with Sugar’s mission as a metatextual shorthand explaining the character’s identity and milieu.
By this point you’ll get the sense that something stranger is up. Sugar’s deference to his M-like superior Ruby hints there’s more to his operation than the classic Marlowe-esque man against the world. And Farrell’s performance is so stilted it skews towards In episode six the plot twist is revealed and it’s a doozy, prefaced with footage of Mitchum’s love-hate monologue from, borrowed its title from the favela named for Saint Augustine’s 5th-century treatise on good and evil, spiritual self-flagellation and redemption. As such,an ambitious swing and a heady head-scratcher – and, to be fair, there’s more intrigue in the bizarre places the series might go next than in the eight episodes it takes to reveal itself.
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