John Sugar (Colin Farrell) is an LA-based Private Detective. Sugar is studious, kind to a fault, loves movies and is extraordinarily good at violence. Every one of those traits collides when he takes a missing persons case for a legendary movie producer. His handler Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) doesn’t want him to do it. David Siegel (Nate Corddry), child actor turned possible criminal doesn’t want him anywhere near it. But Sugar has his reasons and those reasons are going to change everything. For everyone.

I can’t tell you why Sugar is being covered here. It’s an enormous show-altering spoiler. I can tell you this is science fiction to its bones. I can tell you that every question you have is answered and I can tell you that this is categorically not a TV show ashamed of its genre as ‘elevated horror’ and the infamous ‘but it’s not just science fiction’ press tours for so many shows in the early ’00s tried to tell us.

Here’s what else I can tell you. In a year where Farrell is getting justifiably great word for his turn in The Penguin, this may be his best work. He’s always been an infinitely smarter performer than he’s been given credit for and he’s doing ludicrously complex, smart work here. Across the course of the season Farrell shows us the man Sugar thinks he is, the story he’s telling himself and who he truly is. Every inch of him is artifice, from the immaculate suit to the shades, the car and the gun. The tragedy of Sugar is that he’s a good man trying to be a good man and not seeing he is. There are moments of gentle, determined kindness scattered throughout the show that all come back to Sugar’s core belief that people are basically good. He’s studious, calm, painfully empathetic.

The suit covers his scars and works too as armour and cage. Armour to protect a profoundly good man from the world he’s trapped in. Cage to contain that man from going too far. He uses stories as a measure of control too, the show constantly cutting to classic movies and showing us where Sugar gets his moves from. He’s playing himself in the role of a lifetime. He’s also playing himself in the sense that he’s unable to stop doing something no one wants him to do, including himself, until it’s far too late. It’s a great, primal story and one that not only speaks to its film noir and SF roots but finds new ways to use them and new stories to tell. The ending especially is elegant, powerful storytelling that rewards everything you’ve seen up to then.

Farrell is phenomenally good but he’s not alone. Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Ruby is playing just as complicated a character and one who has a different type of story to tell than Sugar. Amy Ryan, who you may also have recently seen as a wildly different character on Only Murders in the Building, is flat out superb too. As Melanie, a person of interest in more ways than one, she’s complex, damaged and no one’s victim. Her relationship with Sugar is intimate but plays with the concept of romance in the same way the show plays with its genre and just as successfully.

Everything works here and works in lockstep with everything else. The direction by Fernando Meirelles and Adam Arkin, the beautiful (and not A.I.! Confirmed!) opening credits, the entire supporting cast. All of it works brilliantly, in both the show it thinks it is and the show it actually is.

Verdict: Sugar is the sort of quiet brilliance that Apple TV has been excelling at in genre ever since it started. It’s not the show you, or it, thinks it is. That show is great. The truth is even better. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart