The era in which noir was at the peak of American cinema culture was relatively brief, as it was directly inspired by the aftermath of the Great Depression. Although World War II led to a period when stories were simplified into more traditional “good versus evil” narratives, the moral ambiguity of these films developed throughout the late-1940s and 50s, and inspired classics such as The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, Double Indemnity, and The Lady From Shanghai. The appeal wasn’t just their recontextualization of the “whodunit” formula, but a result of the strict parameters necessitated by filmmaking technology. The dark edges of their black-and-white frames were inherited from the German Expressionist movement, but slowly faded as Hollywood films grew more polished with technicolor.
The genre has evolved so much that there’s now a revived interest in various deviations from the original model. Recent films like Good Time and Drive were hailed as a return-to-form for the internalized anti-hero stories that were popular during the “New Hollywood” era of the 1970s; similarly, modern crime satires like The Gentlemen and Nightcrawler share the kaleidoscopic approach to noir that made the style of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh so influential in the 1990s. Although there was a brief span in which prestige television attempted to replicate trends that were popular in cinema, it’s evolved into a different entity of detective fiction. Compared to the generic “case of the week” approach of procedural network shows, transgressive crime mysteries like True Detective and Mindhunter succeeded in examining the all-consuming nature of an enigmatic case.
Media has become so stratified that classical noir is a novelty, but that’s the inspiration for Apple TV+’s new drama series Sugar. After his performance as the comic book villain Oz Cobb in The Penguin, Colin Farrell has starred in a much sillier (if just as self-serious) show in which he plays the private detective John Sugar. The fact that Sugar looks, acts, and speaks like Humphrey Bogart is no coincidence; the character’s love of Old Hollywood is directly addressed by the narrative.
Although the show has a cold-open set in Tokyo where Sugar’s brilliant deductive reasoning skills are unveiled, its momentum is far more leisurely in its introduction to the central mystery. Sugar’s drawn to Los Angeles by the wealthy film producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), who’s in need of someone that can find his drug-addicted granddaughter, Olivia (Sydney Chandler). Siegel’s suspicion is that Olivia's involvement with shady characters is what caused her disappearance, but Sugar has seen enough Phillip Marlowe films to know that there must be a larger conspiracy at play. While Sugar has a few plot twists that some may have struggled to anticipate, it doesn’t take a fan to predict that most powerful, mysterious patriarchs who reach out to private investigators have something to hide.
Although the meta quality of a show about a noir obsessive could’ve been played for laughs, Sugar is a deconstruction of why the genre was appealing to captive audiences during uncertain times in American history. It may have evolved into a way to lionize dark, brooding anti-heroes, but noirs are at their best when they note the similarities between the victims, perpetrators, and investigators. Sugar has a strong belief that those that he’s interacted with must fulfill one of these archetypal roles; whether this has made him brilliant, idealistic, pretentious, or hysterical is where the series has created its tension.
Farrell’s a long underappreciated actor, but even his early work in Tigerland and Minority Report was an indication that he had both the chiseled charisma of Paul Newman and the willingness to take risks. He may have spent a portion of his career doing interesting work in projects that were beneath him, but in the aftermath of The Banshees of Inisherin, The Lobster, After Yang, Thirteen Lives, and Widows, it's clear Farrell’s one of the best in the business. Sugar is a project that could’ve been willed into existence only by someone who has already remained durable in the face of criticism. It’s hard to imagine that Ryan Reynolds, Chris Evans, Dwayne Johnson, or even Hugh Jackman or Ryan Gosling would be so willing to fall flat on their face.
The appeal of a star like Farrell has given Sugar the opportunity to round out its cast with a unique roster of underrated actors, breakout performances, and stars of a different generation. Amy Ryan is in her best role since Gone Baby Gone as Olivia’s mother, who’s the closest thing the series has to an audience avatar; although her life contains some buried secrets, she’s not the femme fatale that Sugar has made her out to be. Cromwell’s also entertaining in a role that’s clearly inspired by John Huston’s performance as Noah Cross in Chinatown.