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Gcreating a TV show is not easy. OK, so you have an interesting idea and a good article – but the network or advertising platform will have many other questions. How much will it cost to make, age/number of people who will enjoy it, can it be changed in a one-line summary, can it pay back by running it for several seasons? No one will take a punt on your pet project and you may lose money.
At least that’s the theory, but Apple TV seems happy to order shows that haven’t checked the boxes above. Pound for pound – that is, ignoring the plethora of Netflix shows – it’s probably the best show in the game, having gambled and won on Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Studio, For All Mankind and Widow’s Bay. But it also has regular oddballs that go wrong – Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed and Margo’s Got Money Troubles being two recent ones – and weirdly wrong murders like Cheese Government and Hello Tomorrow! those who have discovered, have done something that no one has understood and disappeared again. You never know what you’re going to get with Apple’s new software, but it might be something that no one else green-lights, and they’re usually right.
Rounding out the duds is Sugar, starring Colin Farrell as Los Angeles private investigator John Sugar. In the first season he investigates a missing girl, and establishes links between his loved ones and criminals of all stripes, with an air of sadness that is reinforced by Farrell’s voice and constant appeal to visual inspiration, film noir.
As well as shooting with a low or tilted camera and portraying L.A. as a city of poor people, Sugar also included old-fashioned footage and other high-quality black-and-white footage, for home television or direct distribution. Farrell’s PI subscribes to the magazine American Cinematographer who drives a 1960s Corvette. Fun for old-fashioned cineastes, then? Not completely: three-quarters of the way through the season, the show revealed that – spoiler alert, although it’s not as spoilery as you might think – John Sugar is an alien who hides his true, bright blue personality and looks like a handsome man in a well-tailored suit.
And so, with our eyebrows still not lowered two years later, we reconnected with Farrell for a second season, only to find the whole foreign business pushed to the curb. The rush of house renovations ensures that John Sugar is back in Tinseltown, alone and haunted by his sister’s persistent disappearance. He is also dedicated in his daily life to take on hopeless cases that other investigators would ignore, such as the disappearance of his Korean boxer brother.
In the broken, forgotten parts of the town we walk, with a picture of the urban beauty that has been mentioned before: it likes the bright paint in front of a closed shop, or the main street in the evening, and cuts between the bent concrete in the middle of the low areas. Sugar sweeps around the place in his fancy car and up and down, looking for clues in the pool hall (Paul Newman in the movie The Hustler) and the boxing gym (Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall), before returning to the stunning beauty of Hollywood at the five-star hotel he has taken home. Here, the TV in her room shows Ida Lupino in Road House singing One for My Baby, her lit cigarette focused on her piano.
John Sugar’s impersonality is another way in which he observes a city where everyone is separated, but he gives another presentation to his audiovisual collage: as well as film notes, we can now cut the comforting shots of cerulean galaxies, where the story has progressed from the gnomic to the cosmic. “Everything ends,” recalls Farrell, as nothing happens. “Sooner than you think, sometimes. From Andromeda’s sun to Paloma, everything dies.” Bogie didn’t have lines like that.
We’re lost in another Apple classic labyrinth, but not tragically. Every moment of Sugar is divine to watch, while the idea of the protagonist’s superpowers being a jaded compassion and a taste for nothing, despite his strange science giving him real powers, continues to shock and amuse. Each episode is half an hour full of sadness and Sugar’s sleep. This show could be on Apple – it’s another world in there.
