God bless James Cromwell, man. The look on his face, the tone of his voice as looks up at Sugar and says he says what he says: “Grace and sensitivity. To the end.” In that look and in that voice there is admiration, resentment, gratitude, skepticism, and awe, all wrapped up. That’s the effect the thoroughly decent can have on the rest of us. We may not suspect that they’re literal aliens, but we still know there’s something very unusual about them. They can make us feel worse about our own shortcomings, but they can also make us want to try harder when we realize they walk among us.

I reviewed the finale of Sugar, a charming show, for Decider.

Okay, so he’s an alien. By now we’ve had a week to digest that John Sugar is a blue superhuman who can stop bullets with his bare hands — a sort of combination Dr. Manhattan/Ozymandias from Watchmen (the comic; we do not speak of the others here). Sure, I’ve been wondering what will happen next, but it was how it would happen that had me worried. Would Sugar still feel like the same offbeat, upbeat neo-noir suggested by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s smoky theme music and Colin Farrell’s impeccable tailoring?

Yes and no. Sugar’s unraveling of the conspiracy against him feels like the Sugar we know. But there’s an element of the resolution of the Olivia mystery — which does get resolved, though there’s a whole episode left for aftershocks and final twists — that rings phony, even in a show about alien private investigators with fists of steel, a heart of gold, and eyes of electric blue. 

I reviewed the most recent episode of Sugar for Decider.

Well, that settles that question!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Sugar for Decider.

There’s an energy to Sugar that’s hard to describe. A lot of it is the performances — a stacked cast of tremendous supporting players, headed by a bonafide movie star, with all the looks and charisma such a job entails. Some of it is the frenetic, finger-snapping editing by Fernando Stutz and John Petaja, which feels more be-bop than the old attention-deficit MTV style. Its dreamy vision of Los Angeles is unique for a noir mystery, in that we’re seeing the city through the eyes of a sweet guy who truly loves the place, not a hard-bitten thrice-around-the-block gunsel or a femme fatale’s hapless patsy.

 I think that may be why a lot of people I know, even professional artists, erroneously pegged the opening credits as AI (it’s not): This is not quite a version of L.A. we’ve seen before. This is not quite a version of the private investigator story we’ve seen before. I’m really not sure what it is, and that’s a wonderful place to be with any story, let alone a mystery.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Sugar for Decider.

John Sugar is a stop and smell the flowers kind of guy. He puts it in so many words to Melanie, the ex-rock star who is his semi-partner in the search for her stepdaughter Olivia. Melanie, shaken by the revelation that Olivia’s half-brother David is a serial rapist, feels differently. “The reason we don’t look,” she suggests, “is it’s all so sad and ugly.”

“Yeah, but not everything,” Sugar counters. Then, with effortless delight, he rattles off several roses to stop and smell, so to speak. “Sea lions…Patti Smith…Cypress trees…The sound of your little sister laughing and having fun…Paris.” Even Melanie, who’s never been there, has to admit Paris seems pretty good.

This exchange from Sugar’s fourth episode (“Starry Eyed”) could not have better encapsulated the mental and emotional battle that consumed my brain for years during a prolonged bout of major depression. The depressed part of me, the Melanie part, fully and truly believed that life is defined by its worst moments, the world by its horrors. The healthy part of me, the not-sick part of me, is John Sugar conceding “Yeah,” then adding “…but not everything.” 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Sugar for Decider.

Uhhh…is John Sugar an alien? 

Is Ruby an alien? Is everyone in the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine an alien? 

Is Sugar a show about aliens???????????

Forgive me if I’m jumping off the deep end here. I suppose there could be any number of explanations for John Sugar’s physical inability to get drunk, or his ability to catch flies with chopsticks, or his immunity to anger and violence. Maybe the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine is just a run of the mill organization of ex-spies who come together to save the world, like Davey Siegel suggests — and which Bernie Siegel rejects as the preposterous premise of one of his own shitty movies. Maybe when Ruby tells Sugar “We’re here to observe these people, not participate in their lives,” she’s not echoing Star Trek’s Prime Directive, nor Jor-El’s words to Kal-El in Superman: “Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them.”

But anything’s possible, right? And a private-eye series willing to bend the genre far enough to incorporate a hero who’s a pure white hat is probably willing to bend it even farther and place that white hat atop a large, domelike grey head, right?

I reviewed the third episode of Sugar for Decider.

COP VS. COP. MERCILESS. MR. MAYHEM. There’s an art to coming up with good fake names for pop culture trash. Seinfeld had it, with bogus titles that nailed genre after 1990s film genre: Chunnel, Checkmate, Rochelle Rochelle, Prognosis Negative. The comics writer Grant Morrison exquisitely spoofed the compound-word and common-noun names of XXXTREME!!! grunge-era superheroes like Venom, Deadpool, and Cable in their and Keith Giffen’s parody comic Doom Force: Gridlock, Timesheet, Campfire, Spatula. And with the three titles listed at the top of this paragraph — movies produced by squirrelly sleazeball Bernie Siegel, played by Dennis Boutsikaris, a welcome face anywhere he shows up — Sugar shows it has that juice.

I reviewed the second episode of Sugar for Decider.

Private investigator John Sugar is OP. “Overpowered,” to the non-gamers out there. His skills have been maxed out, to the point where almost nothing can faze him. He’s handsome. He’s wealthy. He’s successful. He’s good at his job. He speaks fluent English, Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. He wears beautiful suits and drives an incredible car. His partner may be even smarter and better looking than he is. He’s a skilled hand-to-hand fighter, but he hates violence. He catches a fly with chopsticks. He can metabolize alcohol at a frankly unbelievable fifty times the rate of normal men. He may be Wolverine.

And he’s kind, too. Superhumanly so. None of the above attributes have gone to his head at all. He does not appear to be a bully, an egotist, a womanizer, or any of the other shortcomings you might expect of someone so blessed. He’s not arrogant about his gifts, nor is he apologetic; he simply uses them to the best of his abilities. He’s friendly to everyone, and sincerely interested in them, knowing the names and family lives of the workers at the hotel where he lives in a well-appointed bungalow. He’s a helper, constantly going out of his way to get people out of jams — a yakuza boss client with a kidnapped child, a limousine driver he overhears talking about his sick daughter, a homeless guy with a dog who happens to be outside a bar Sugar has to visit for work. He is Agent Dale Cooper levels of tall, dark, handsome, and decent. He’s the white private dick that’s a nice machine to all the chicks.

I’m covering Sugar for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.