Sugar Season 2 Review: Colin Farrell’s Sci-Fi Noir Returns, Weaving a Mystery with Soulful, Stylish Confidence

Apple TV’s Sugar is one of only a few times in my life when a film or television series has truly surprised me without my seeing the twist coming from a mile away. You’re talking to a guy who guessed the twist in The Sixth Sense from watching the trailer. However, Sugar’s first-season episode, “Go Home,” delivered such an audacious twist that you almost thought it was either the most brilliant move in streaming history or the moment when the series not only jumped the shark, but jumped the Fonz as well.

Sugar’s jaw-dropping bold swing has its detractors. However, the contemporary take on hard-boiled detective noir allowed the series to go beyond investigating the blood spilled on the City of Angels’ sunburnt streets. The simple maneuver allowed the series to view the classic genre through the wide eyes of Colin Farrell’s titular character, who is now allowed to experience love and hate, empathy and cruelty, naivety and cynicism, not to mention the magic of movies, something all audiences can hang their hat on.

The second season’s smoky sci-fi noir deepens its mystery, expands its mythology, and keeps its cool cinematic soul.

What is Apple TV’s Sugar Season 2 about?

The story picks up months after John Sugar (The Penguin’s Colin Farrell) solved the case of Jonathan Siegel’s (L.A. Confidential’s James Cromwell) missing granddaughter, only to discover that his best friend, Henry (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Jason Butler Harner), was behind the experiments and murders, and was likely the man responsible for the disappearance of Sugar’s sister. The mystery still haunts him, the mythological hook that drives the series through its science-fiction noir trappings.

Now, most of his inner circle has gone back home, including Ruby (The Sandman’s Kirby), and John is left to his own devices. Luckily, the private detective has all the right trappings: the Warner Grand Theatre, the Bogart-and-Sinatra style, snappy suspenders, cufflinks, a crisp dress shirt, and a baby-blue 1966 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray convertible to help sell the illusion. Living out of a suitcase in one of Los Angeles’ classic hotels, life is good, but great when Sugar finds trouble or trouble finds him.

Sugar is the type of man, and film connoisseur, with a black-and-white movie like Kiss Me Deadly always playing in the background; let’s say his affectations are cool, stoic, and effortlessly cinematic. Soon, the private dick finds himself back under fluorescent lights, investigating the disappearance of a local junkie (Quantum Leap’s Raymond Lee) last seen stealing drugs from a hospital. His brother, Danny (Devs’ Jin Ha), is an up-and-coming boxer with ties to illegal wheeling and dealing across the Southland.

Apple TV’s Sugar Season 2 Review

What you will love about the second season is that the series has no trouble introducing new characters. In a testament to strong genre writing, a main character is only as good as the company they keep. That includes femme fatale Charlotte Fischer (Laura Donnelly), who has a Golden Age of Hollywood vibe that John can’t take his eyes off of. Then there is Val (Sasha Calle), a drifter Sugar takes in, making her his Robin, Andy Richter, or Goose, and another set of eyes that Hall & Oates warned us about.

Of course, this is Farrell’s show, with a performance that combines classic detective cool with a fascinating character study beneath the surface, continuing to explore inherent goodness, inherent evil, and that pesky moral ambiguity that makes up the human condition. That’s where creator and showrunner Mark Protosevich (Thor) comes in, crafting a character who is the antithesis of Mike Hammer and Sam Spade, both of whom are driven by their brutal, selfish, and cynical ways.

Farrell’s character is patient, gentle, empathetic, and, yes, as usual for a fish-out-of-water character, innocent. (There is an eye-popping scene where the private eye is drawn into a trap that proves this point early on.) What makes the writing so effective is the foregoing of confrontation to move the story. Protosevich and the creative team portray him as compassionate, watching Sugar befriend almost everyone because he’s so magnanimous.

Is Apple TV’s Sugar Season 2 worth watching?

Farrell has so much gravitas that you almost forget how subdued the performance is; he commands the screen with a single look within a single frame. Together, the production design, a love letter to the old La La Land that still exists today, and the smoky, soulful score from Luke Cage composers Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge help create the series’ immersive vibe. This time, the mystery is even better, with everything working so harmoniously that I was transported to another time and place of classic Hollywood noir.

Of course, we have not addressed the elephant in the room, which I have purposely avoided in case you still have not watched the slow-burning first season. While the revelation works well, the mythology of this storyline is saved for the final episodes, which has me questioning the direction of the show if we are lucky enough to be gifted a third season. The finale can feel like a puzzle piece that does not quite fit.

Yet, the way Sugar takes classic noir clichés and ties them into sci-fi twists and turns proves this is a show worth losing yourself in.

You can stream Sugar season 2 exclusively on Apple TV starting June 19th at 12 am PT / 3 am ET. A new episode will drop every week until the season finale on August 7th! All eight episodes were screened for this review.

Sugar Season 2 Review: Colin Farrell’s Sci-Fi Noir Returns, Weaving a Mystery with Soulful, Stylish Confidence