Review: Sugar, with Colin Farrell as an alien private eye, gets a new and improved second season
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For whatever reason, I never reviewed the first season of “Sugar,” which I’d stopped watching before its late-season big reveal — the detective (Colin Farrell as John Sugar) is an alien.Had that happened earlier in the story I might have hung on, but strictly as a production, I’d found its brand of neo-noir to be mannered, gimmicky, obvious, overdirected (by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian director of the fine “City of Men”) and, as you may have surmised, off-putting.This is by way of announcing that the second season arrives Friday on Apple TV and that I like it very much.
The stylistic eccentricities have been dialed back, including the use of old Hollywood film clips to reflect the action and possibly the thoughts of its main character, a cinephile from space, who is both practicing and enacting the work of a private detective.He reads American Cinematographer; he takes the Paramount studio tour, then takes it again.
One might navigate the new season without having watched the first, though at least reading an online synopsis.Sam Catlin (“Preacher”) has taken over as showrunner from series creator Mark Protosevich; the tone is lighter, the plot less perverse.
Under new director of photography Marshall Adams, the camerawork, formerly too quirky by half — a mishmash of lenses and film stocks and canted angles — has settled down, as has the editing, enhancing the story by letting it breathe and staying out of the way of Farrell’s singular performance — the series’ distinguishing feature and warm heart.For all his influences, Det.
Sugar is the one character who can’t easily be traced back to an earlier model.As detectives go, he’s unusually sweet, optimistic, diplomatic, willing to give a villain a way out, closer to the Man Who Fell to Earth than to Sam Spade.
He loves animals, and they love him.Farrell, who also narrates in a soft voice, o...