Sugar
Apple TV+ (from Friday, April 5)
★★

When future TV historians point to the death knell of Hollywood’s obsession with “prestige TV”, Apple TV’s new series Sugar must be a target. The eight-part noir series has all the rote ingredients – an Oscar-nominated art-house auteur behind the camera, a respected A-lister as its lead, even a slick title sequence to open each episode – and they’re all in service of such boggling inanity that you’ll immediately rewatch the whole thing in bug-eyed shock.

What initially seems an intriguing meditation on the way media has saturated our lives and defined our behaviours, by way of the detective noir – one of cinema and TV’s most cliched and self-referential genre forms – turns into something so ludicrous by episode six that to spoil it would deprive you of one of the year’s most goofily bonkers TV pivots.

Directed and co-produced by Brazilian fave Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) and created and co-written by Mark Protosevich (The Cell, I Am Legend), the series stars Colin Farrell – in his first major role since his acclaimed turn in The Banshees of Inisherin – as John Sugar, a private investigator with a love of fine whiskey and film criticism (he reads Cahiers du Cinema, Sight and Sound, American Cinematographer), and a classic moral code (he hates guns and violence but will use them very effectively when necessary).

Like any private dick, Sugar’s got his own reason for doing the job; sometime in the past his sister went missing, so he searches for others as spiritual retribution. So when he’s hired by Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), the legendary patriarch of a Hollywood dynasty, to find his missing granddaughter Olivia, Sugar dives obsessively into a conspiracy that stretches through Hollywood’s sordid NDA-curtain, political cover-ups and sex-trafficking criminal gangs.

So far, so familiar – which is the point. As a director, Meirelles is a child in a sandpit, indulging in a genre’s shared romance and language – he plays with noir’s infamous angles, exposures, shadows, jump cuts and, notably, with actual film footage from noir cinema’s golden age, black-and-white footage of Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, Glenn Ford in The Big Heat, Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage and so on, interspersed with Sugar’s mission as a metatextual shorthand explaining the character’s identity and milieu. It’s playful and weird and intellectual, until it all but disappears around episode three and the series prioritises a flimsy plot that feels like any free-to-air crime procedural.

By this point (if you make it this far) you’ll get the sense that something stranger is up. Sugar’s deference to his M-like superior Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) hints there’s more to his operation than the classic Marlowe-esque man against the world. And Farrell’s performance is so stilted it skews towards those Freddie Highmore-in-The Good Doctor memes; you’ll be asking yourself what this guy’s deal is.

In episode six the plot twist is revealed and it’s a doozy, prefaced with footage of Mitchum’s love-hate monologue from Night of the Hunter, which becomes the series’ sophomoric thesis.