It took a good friend of mine three episodes of the Apple TV Plus show Sugar before he texted me to say that he thought he knew the big twist the series was hiding and that it was “so insane” he had “no choice but to respect it.” Intrigued, I dove into Sugar myself, and three episodes in, I came to the exact same conclusion — but I’m not going to share it with you here because you really need to see it for yourself.
Sugar’s twist has become a point of some contention in the lead-up to its premiere, with a few critics who reviewed the whole season calling it “disastrous,” among other things. Me? I love a disaster. I also love watching Colin Farrell drive around in a cool blue roadster trying to solve a mystery. And those two things are not incompatible.
To be clear: It’s not hard to guess what Sugar creator Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend) has up his sleeve. The hints begin with really large breadcrumbs in episode 1, and they only get bigger until the show abandons all subtlety around the third episode, which has a sequence that basically dares you to guess what it won’t divulge for several more weeks. It’s also something easily found online, as lots of viewers watching week to week have figured it out on Reddit and other platforms, and critics who have seen the whole season have not been shy about sharing the skinny.
Image: Apple TV Plus
What makes sussing this out even easier is the fact that Sugar is an otherwise run-of-the-mill noir pastiche, about private detective John Sugar (Farrell), who’s on a case to find the missing granddaughter of a legendary Hollywood producer. In such a familiar genre, anything out of the ordinary — like its frequent interpolations with scenes of classic cinema, or its flashy editing style, which presents scenes in an impressionistic, overlapping montage of conversations and movement — registers as exceedingly meaningful.
This has been the biggest criticism of the show: It’s not an inventive noir, so its big swerve overwhelms the story. I don’t happen to agree, but I also love the rhythms of a noir, of following a detective as he drives around town looking for answers and only finding more questions, railing against the limits of his masculinity. Whether or not you’re on board with what Protosevich is obscuring, Sugar pulls off moody noir just fine — Farrell’s guttural narration accompanies dreamy cinematography for a hypnotic viewing experience, and the central mystery takes ample dark turns as Sugar works his way toward an answer.
And yet: Knowing there’s a twist, and guessing it in real time, was tremendous fun, a game I think everyone should play. You could always Google it yourself, of course — but experiencing a plot turn and reading a summary of it are two very different things, and few recent shows illustrate that better than Sugar.
Besides, once you do guess it, you’ll want all your friends to do the same, and that’s where the real fun begins.
Sugar is streaming on Apple TV Plus, with new episodes on Fridays.