‘Sugar’ Series Premiere Recap: Superdick

Private investigator John Sugar is OP. “Overpowered,” to the non-gamers out there. His skills have been maxed out, to the point where almost nothing can faze him. He’s handsome. He’s wealthy. He’s successful. He’s good at his job. He speaks fluent English, Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. He wears beautiful suits and drives an incredible car. His partner may be even smarter and better looking than he is. He’s a skilled hand-to-hand fighter, but he hates violence. He catches a fly with chopsticks. He can metabolize alcohol at a frankly unbelievable fifty times the rate of normal men. He may be Wolverine.

And he’s kind, too. Superhumanly so. None of the above attributes have gone to his head at all. He does not appear to be a bully, an egotist, a womanizer, or any of the other shortcomings you might expect of someone so blessed. He’s not arrogant about his gifts, nor is he apologetic; he simply uses them to the best of his abilities. He’s friendly to everyone, and sincerely interested in them, knowing the names and family lives of the workers at the hotel where he lives in a well-appointed bungalow. He’s a helper, constantly going out of his way to get people out of jams — a yakuza boss client with a kidnapped child, a limousine driver he overhears talking about his sick daughter, a homeless guy with a dog who happens to be outside a bar Sugar has to visit for work. He is Agent Dale Cooper levels of tall, dark, handsome, and decent. He’s the white private dick that’s a nice machine to all the chicks.

Personally, I love OP characters in fiction just as much as I love playing as one in video games. (By the time I got to Ganondorf in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I was so OP could have beat God Himself if He were the game’s final boss.) I love seeing how they slice through the world. I love examining how their easy successes shed light on the obstacles faced by everyone else, how they help us understand our own lives’ struggles through their absence in the character’s. 

Not gonna lie, I like watching them whip ass and win all the time, too. My three favorite superheroes are Batman, the guy smart and rich and well-disciplined enough to defeat everyone from the Joker to Solaris the Tyrant Sun, and Superman and the Hulk, their respective universes’ two strongest heroes. On television, I’m fascinated by Rand al’Thor, the chosen-one hero of The Wheel of Time, who’s like if Frodo Baggins or Jon Snow started out wielding the powers of Doctor Manhattan. In most epic fantasy, that’s simply not how it’s done.

The same can be said of the noir, mystery, and private detective movies on which Sugar writer-creator Mark Protosevich and diretor Fernando Meirelles are so playfully, thoughtfully, creatively riffing — movies which constantly appear in little snippets that match Sugar’s actions or interior monologue. Any private dick worth his whiskey is gonna have feet of clay, is gonna get his ass kicked, is gonna be down on his luck, is gonna have it bad for some dame, is gonna get in over his head. You can increase all that by several orders of magnitude for a noir protagonist, whose whole job is to be a poor sap. You just don’t see paragons of Arthurian virtue strolling down these mean streets very often.

You also don’t see TV shows made this vivaciously. From the moment the opening sequence’s crisp black and white segues into even crisper color…no, from the moment the episode opens on an iris, an effect I don’t think I’ve seen used on TV in this way since the Scorsese-directed premiere of Boardwalk Empire…no, from the energetic jazz-funk opening theme by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest — from all that, it was clear that this wasn’t gonna be a wallpapery kind of show. 

Nor was it going to be in the mode of painstaking realism selected by Perry Mason, the brilliant detective noir series killed in its relative infancy by the barbarians at the gates over at HBO/Max. The palette, the off-kilter camera work, editing that will cut from one angle on a character to another mid-sentence: It feels designed to be as ebullient as Sugar himself is restrained. It gives the show an energy the character himself neither can nor should be expected to provide.

What does he provide? He’s basically our Virgil on a tour of contemporary Los Angeles filled with marvelous character actors. The great James Cromwell co-stars as Jonathan Siegel, a very rich, highly respected, seemingly okay Hollywood producer whose junkie granddaughter, Olivia (Sydney Chandler), has gone missing. The problem is that she’s been sober for months and is no longer in the habit of going on benders. He suspects foul play, and brings in Sugar to investigate. 

Sugar is immediately drawn to Olivia’s two moms. Her biological mother, Rachel Kaye (Natalie Alyn Lind), was a beautiful and acclaimed actor who died young from causes which I believe are as yet unspecified. Her most acclaimed role involved her character describing being raped in a monologue Sugar finds a video of Olivia reenacting word for word. He also discovers a trove of racy pictures of Rachel, for some reason in Olivia’s possession.

Olivia’s stepmom — for a while anyway; one gets the sense that her dad, a less successful movie producer named Bernard, has gone through a lot of wives — is a rock star named Melanie Matthews, who in another gift from the casting gods is played by Amy Ryan. When Sugar tracks her down, she takes an immediate liking to him — one of the perks of being OP is Amy Ryan likes you instantly — and the two spend the afternoon talking and drinking. She winds up soused; he’s sober as a judge thanks to his aforementioned super-metabolism. He takes her home at her request, but refuses her advances and tucks her in instead.

It’s not all beautiful dames being treated respectfully for Sugar, though. Olivia’s brother Davey (Nate Corddry), a former child star turned major adult asshole, and his henchman Kenny (Alex Hernandez) keep following Sugar around. Are they involved in her disappearance, or just trying to keep him from finding something else — like the dead body in the trunk of her car, perhaps?

And we haven’t even touched Sugar’s personal life, such as it is. He lives in a hotel because he likes the efficiency. Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), his girl Friday, is concerned about him taking this case — firstly because Siegel didn’t hire him through her, the proper channel, and secondly because it reminds him too much of “Jen,” whoever that is. He’s got uncontrollable tremors in his arm and the occasional episode of extremely convincing hallucinations, which he appears to address by injecting an old-timey syringe of an unspecified drug directly into his neck. (Yeesh.) And oh, he did get slashed by a knife in the opening and the wound doesn’t instantly heal itself, so I guess he’s not Wolverine after all.

But he’s intriguing, that’s for sure. He’s based on the premise that Colin Farrell can play both for and against type simultaneously: that he can be handsome, suave, and hyper-competent without being pompous or imperious or evil too. As far as we know, anyway. Mysteries still abound, from the identity of “Jen” to the cause of Olivia’s disappearance to the very odd invitation he receives from an international society of polyglots like himself. But the most intriguing mystery is how much further the filmmakers are willing to push the boundaries of how such stories look and feel. Now that’s a mystery I want to see solved.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.