Throughout a century steeped in pop culture, Los Angeles has been portrayed as an alluringly exotic destination unlike any other in the cosmos, captured in both words and images. Its propensity for natural disasters, a diverse array of picturesque settings ideal for moral decay and debauchery, the allure of its sunshine and its hidden secrets all combine to create a captivatingly troubled paradise, ready for the camera’s lens.
Its strangeness was made for, and by, film noir. Here’s one example: “Sugar,” starring Colin Farrell as a mysteriously well-off private eye specializing in missing-person cases. Creator and lead writer Mark Protosevich’s slippery fish of an eight-part series, with its first two episodes premiering April 5, owes debts all over town – to the legendary movies beloved by the title character, and to LA’s infinite capacity for new wrinkles along familiar fault lines.
There’s a whopper of a reveal at the story’s three-quarter juncture, so we’ll avoid that for a few paragraphs (no spoilers, though). We meet Farrell’s character, John Sugar, in a black-and-white Tokyo prologue, as he successfully if violently resolves the kidnapping and ransom case of a yakuza’s young son. Locating the missing, he murmurs in archetypal noir voiceover, makes for “a tough business. But steady.”
The rest of “Sugar” unfolds mostly in color, and in greater as well as much, much lesser Los Angeles. Sugar’s new case involves the apparent disappearance of 25-year-old Olivia Siegel (Sydney Chandler), tarnished Hollywood royalty. She’s the daughter of movie director Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris, a casual, wry sort of skeeze). Olivia’s actress mother, as we’re told, died in a car accident in 1998. The family scion and true legend, producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), hires Sugar for the search-and-rescue job, staying classically tight-lipped about his motives, though he’s frank about his pampered offspring, notably grandson and one-time child actor David (Nate Corddry).
Sugar’s hourly rate exceeds the average gumshoe’s. When in LA, he lives his monastic private life in a swank hotel, meeting with his apparent agency boss Ruby (played by the actress Kirby, who’s terrific) while tooling around town in a sleek blue Corvette. Ruby is concerned about his health, and how this particular case might mess with this distinctly proper and contained man’s guarded psyche. In teasing half-fragments, the series tells us Sugar’s sister too went missing, once upon a time, and he’s coping uneasily with the trauma.
The labyrinth takes the detective into dark corners and other brutal disappearances all over the county. Amy Ryan, who excels in the role of a Joni Mitchell-type rock legend and Bernie Siegel’s ex-wife, becomes Sugar’s confidante and sounding board. Creator Protosevich treats this character’s struggles with addiction and recovery seriously and effectively; likewise, a #MeToo scandal enveloping the Siegel family develops into more than mere topical referencing. It’s at once plausible in the context of the story and nicely threaded in the middle episodes. Fernando Meirelles (”City of God,” “The Constant Gardener”) directs five of the episodes with a fine eye for the destablizing composition; veteran TV director Adam Arkin handles the other three.
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