Golden and delicious, with L.A. sunshine and flashbacks to film noir, Apple TV has hit the sweet spot with Colin Farrell in Sugar. It’s an interesting show because of its plots, beautiful, painterly visual compositions, and its sublimated eroticism, but also because it has unexpected politics.
Farrell plays a highly-paid international private detective. In Season 1 he’s wrapped up a case in Japan and returned to Los Angeles, hired by the patriarch of a multi-generational Jewish family of amoral film industry A-listers (and B-listers) to find a missing daughter. He comes across the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. Murderous gangs. Human trafficking. Coyotes who separate families, skimming off young girls for sex slavery before transporting the rest of the families to L.A. for other menial work—and shooting fathers who complain as their daughters are ordered onto a separate van. Parts of L.A. shown here look like they could use some cleansing fires.
Strangely, the aliens don’t say anything about how humanity is on the verge of destroying itself with climate change, greed, a “phobia” of the day, or othering others.
The one bow to woke politics is that in Season 1 and Season 2, Farrell’s character, John Sugar, hires a lesbian Girl Friday. Paula Andrea Placido, whose extensive credits include The L Word: Generation Q, plays “Charlie,” an overall-wearing (and very attractive) butch who drives a van and serves as a lookout for Sugar. She doesn’t survive Season 1, so in Season 2 Sugar hires a slightly more femme con artist and thief, “Vai,” played by another Latino actor, Sasha Calle, who was Supergirl in a DC Comics film before the current Supergirl movie. Perhaps with John Sugar’s looks and money, today’s writers and audience couldn’t imagine him not taking advantage of a young female assistant, unless they’re lesbians. Or at least not in today’s Hollywood. Maybe that’s why so many young actresses now are gay or non-binary.
And Sugar has money. A classic convertible, a closet full of expensive suits that other characters often remark on (his cover as a probation officer is blown because he dresses too expensively), living permanently in a luxurious boutique hotel. Walking-around money to bribe or buy answers and assistance at every opportunity.
In a way Sugar is very similar to The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix), where attorney Micky Haller is gifted with the classic cars and other assets of a deceased attorney by a judge, on the condition that he take on his many open cases. Though the exact mechanics are not explained, Sugar has his wealth because he’s not a lawyer, but an extra-terrestrial.
In Season 1 we don’t learn this until near the last episode. Aliens who can shapeshift to look human (they already look humanoid, just hairless and blue-skinned), do a slight bit of telekinesis, read human emotions telepathically, tell if people are lying, communicate telepathically with dogs and other animals, take much more of a beating than any human can as well as drink us under the table, and beat a larger and more dangerous-looking earthling into a pulp.
Sugar’s catnip to attractive women, though so far he just drinks them under the table, while sensitive to their emotions, takes them home, and sleeps on the couch so he can make sure they are alright. Whether the aliens can bump nasties with humans we await to find out. Season 2 has so far cycled out all of the cast of Season 1, not just the aliens returning to their home world, but the humans, like a potential girlfriend (to whom he revealed his secret identity) played by actress Amy Ryan. These aliens are also morally and emotionally more balanced than humans.
But someone among the human Powers That Be finds out about them, and the aliens leave as they’re in danger of being hunted. Sugar stays behind partly because he likes it, and partly to track down another alien who remains, whose taste for abduction and killing has blossomed on earth. But may have started back on the home world with Sugar’s own sister.
By the end of Season 2, episode 2, Sugar’s shot in his car and left for dead, possibly by one of the Latin gangs that rule large swaths of L.A. When Sugar was fatally stabbed and losing blood in Season 1, other aliens were ready-to-hand with medicine and alien blood for transfusions. This time fans will have to wait until July 3rd for the next episode to find out how he survives.