[COLUMN] Sugar is a Show About Learning Humanity at the Movies | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains big spoilers for Sugar. Like, HUGE spoilers. So, if you want to see it sight-unseen, do so now.

Look, there’s a big spoiler warning right above this, but it’s really worth stressing this in the body of the text. If you haven’t seen Sugar, this article is going to talk about Sugar in its entirety. There is a huge twist that is revealed at the climax of the sixth episode of the eight-episode season that radically recontextualizes the entire show, and discussing Sugar is inevitably going to involve revealing that twist, which is probably best experienced first-hand and in real-time.

Sugar is a 1950s throwback, following private detective John Sugar (Colin Farrell) through the gritty Los Angeles underworld as he investigates the disappearance of Olivia Siegel (Sydney Chandler), granddaughter of legendary Hollywood producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell). Sugar himself feels like a refugee from one of Siegel’s classic movies, monologuing to himself as he drives across the city in a vintage Chevrolet Corvette.

Over the course of the show, it quickly becomes clear that John Sugar is not a normal private detective. He displays uncanny strength. He talks like a film noir character. His body seems to be going through some sort of shock, as if adjusting to a strange environment. One of the great pleasures of Sugar, which is a largely charming series, is trying to deduce the nature of John Sugar before the show makes the reveal explicit. Is he an angel? Is this a simulation? Is he in a coma?

Ultimately, the reveal at the end of the sixth episode is that John Sugar is actually a blue-skinned alien. He belongs to a larger party of aliens that have come to Earth as observers in the wake of the destruction of their own planet. This is a delightful twist, one that manages the rare trick of both being entirely consistent with what the show has set up and delightful bizarre. The revelation has been somewhat divisive, described as the “most insane twist ever.”

The twist is both the best thing and the worst thing about it, and it feeds the show’s best and worst impulses. The biggest problems with it are strictly narrative, in that Sugar has to spend a significant portion of its final quarter embroiled in the internal politics and machinations of these visitors, which distracts from the engine that had been driving the story: Olivia’s disappearance. Sugar commits very hard to the aliens-among-us premise, which means that it pivots very sharply.

So, a lot of things happen in the final two episodes of the season that don’t feel like organic developments from the show’s opening six episodes. It’s revealed, for example, that not only are the aliens here, but that there are humans in positions of authority who know about them. The nature of this relationship is never explored or explained – there is no time – but the show establishes that these human allies have turned on the visitors, which forces the visitors to withdraw.

That is a lot of plot information for Sugar to have to work through in what is in effect the third act of its private detective story. The problem is compounded by the way that this plot intersects with Sugar’s own personal mythology. The show has established that Sugar’s primary motivation is “finding people who are lost” as a way of working through the trauma of his missing sister Djen. This is a solid thematic and character hook into the story, but Sugar starts heaping plot upon it.

Inevitably, the final stretch reveals that one of Sugar’s alien companions, Henry (Jason Butler Harner), was responsible for abducting Djen. This would be a neat coincidence of itself, but the show compounds it with the revelation that Henry has also been working with human serial killers, and is complicit in the case that Sugar is investigating in Los Angeles. With both Sugar and Henry remaining behind on Earth, this is a blatant hook for a potential second season, but it’s also incredibly contrived.

It's a shame, because the reveal of Sugar’s true nature works remarkably well as a thematic statement. It is reasonably well set-up within the narrative, at least to the extent that such a dramatic genre pivot can be set up within the framework of a film noir. The show never conceals the fact that there’s something very peculiar about Sugar, and that he doesn’t neatly fit into the world around him. The show even hints at the nature of that abnormality.

In the show’s premiere, while explaining that his body processes alcohol too fast to allow him to get drunk, Sugar is charmed to discover that Melanie Mackintosh (Amy Ryan), Olivia’s stepmother, loves science-fiction. In the show’s fourth episode, while being examined by a doctor (Scott Lawrence), Sugar invokes a scene from The Thing in which an alien attacks a doctor examining it while disguised as a human, even playing a clip to underscore the point.

Crucially, though, the show’s frame of reference provides an obvious point of intersection. Like other recent series including Hello Tomorrow!, Ripley, and Fallout, Sugar is a show firmly situated within a 1950s milieu. The show’s film noir aesthetic, with direct invocations of classics like Sunset Boulevard and Touch of Evil, is an obvious invocation of the era. However, the decade was also an era defined by speculative fiction and scientific progress.

The 1950s were a golden age for science-fiction, including movies about alien visitors like The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Thing from Another World. These high-concept features provided a framework for American pop culture to work through its anxieties about the perceived threat of communism, obvious in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Indeed, these two strands of popular entertainment occasionally intersected. Kiss Me Deadly is a film noir about the atomic bomb.

This gets at the central themes of Sugar. This is a show about mediated reality, about the power of watching. Throughout the show, even before his precise nature is revealed, Sugar admits that he is meant to be an observer rather than a participant. “I’m not supposed to get this involved,” he confesses in the second episode. “Just observe and report.” Later, his handler, Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), warns him, “We’re here to observe these people, not participate in their lives.”

Sugar is a keen observer. He has a voracious appetite for cinema. He often quotes and references film noir, and the show constantly intercuts snippets of those older movies into the action. Attending a retrospective screening of one of Jonathan Seigel’s classic movies, Sugar sneaks into the projection booth to talk with the projectionist (Adrian Martinez). The projectionist is impressed by Sugar’s knowledge. “I assume you were studying Kurosawa and Godard by the age of five?”

Sugar laughs it off. “I didn’t really discover movies until much later in life,” he admits. “But, uh, when I did, you know, bad guys, good guys, femme fatales, killer robots, cowardly lions. I loved it. All of it. Amazing, the things you can learn just from watching the movies.” This is, in effect, the thesis statement of Sugar. This is a series about an alien who comes to Earth and who learns what it means to be human from watching movies. It is an incredibly romantic notion.

There’s an endearing innocence and wonder to Sugar, which drew Farrell to the part. Farrell responded to Sugar’s “curiosity and this love for his fellow man and woman.” The character has a profound decency and humanism that he inherited from devouring classic movies. If critic Pauline Kael famously “lost it at the movies”, then Sugar found his humanity at the theatre. Melanie finds herself deeply drawn to Sugar as “a decent guy”, that decency largely rooted in emulating classic movies.

This is a clever thematic hook for a show like this, and Sugar works so well because it contrasts the vision of humanity and masculinity that Sugar inherits from popular culture with the reality underpinning the industry and production of this mythology. As Sugar investigates Olivia’s disappearance, he finds himself drawn into a web of sexual violence and brutality, systems of abuse and indifference that are very much at odds with the warmth of the films themselves.

Sugar is very obviously informed by revelations like the #MeToo movement, which exposed the predatory behaviors of key movers and shakers within the film industry. In particular, Sugar discovers that Olivia’s half-brother David (Nate Corddry) had a fetish for blackmailing and assaulting young actors. It is perhaps a facile observation, but Sugar is preoccupied with the gulf that exists between the narratives crafted through film and the realities of the system that produces those stories.

All the best parts of the show are built around that central thematic tension, the gulf between the kind of character that these movies feature and the types of people who actually make them. The show’s big twist makes a great deal of sense in the context of that central theme, because Sugar needs to feel like a character from one of these movies free from the baggage that comes with their production. Sugar needs to exist in a vacuum, and what greater vacuum than outer space?

Indeed, this is the most interesting tension between Sugar and Henry. Henry is also an observer, after a fashion. In a macabre twist on the extraterrestrial mythologies of cattle mutilations and alien autopsies, Henry likes to watch murderers ply their trade. If Sugar is an alien whose experience of humanity has been shaped by watching humanity’s romantic fantasies captured on screen, then Henry is a monster who feeds on humanity’s grittier real-life horrors.

Sugar leans a little too heavily on the story implications of its late-stage reveal, which throws off the show’s pacing and plotting. It holds the series back from true greatness. However, there’s something very endearing in the show’s central themes, the way that weds two classic mid-century genres together into a celebration of the power of constructed narratives to define the people that we might want to be. The show stumbles in execution, but it’s a pretty sweet idea.