Time for a Sugar Rush
Apple TV+’s Sugar is not the best TV show I’ve seen this year, but it did give me my favorite TV moment so far this year. It was somewhere in the middle of episode three when it suddenly hit me: Wait. That can’t be what this show is about. Unless …
That was it. I, much like Colin Farrell’s private investigator John Sugar, had been drawn hopelessly into a byzantine mystery with twists I couldn’t possibly have predicted when I took up the case. I was on a Sugar high, and I wanted the whole world to join me. I was also cursed with a dilemma: How can I get other people to watch this show without ruining what’s fun about watching this show? The answer I settled on was puns. For the past few weeks, my (very patient) friends have tolerated my texts about getting Sugar-pilled or letting Apple TV+ pour some Sugar on them.
But now Sugar is this close to sifting through your hands. Tomorrow’s episode, the sixth of eight, is poised to reveal the big twist that reviewers — at Apple’s request — have been so cagey about (even as the marketing has hammered the note that a big twist is coming). As Vulture recapper Andy Anderson wrote last week, “The real exciting twists and turns are just beginning to materialize.”
If the prospect of figuring out the big twist is what gets you to hit play on Sugar, I can nudge you in the right direction. (Take it from this Sugar fiend: Pay extra-close attention anytime Kirby is onscreen or John Sugar has an anxiety attack.) But honestly, my pitch is simpler than that: Right now — yes, today — is the time for a Sugar binge. Waiting any longer dramatically increases your chances of getting spoiled by someone goofing on the big reveal once it goes public. You’ve only missed five episodes, and most of them hover right around 30 minutes. To catch up in time for episode six will take you about three hours.
But you’ll probably get it before then. If your experience of Sugar is anything like mine, you’ll be grooving along to this pleasantly by-the-numbers California neo-noir, clocking (but mostly shrugging at) the occasional off-kilter detail, until it suddenly hits you. To my mind, the great success of Sugar is that the twist is simultaneously far, far beyond what anyone could reasonably have predicted and the only answer that makes any sense when you add up the clues.
I am aware that telling you to watch Sugar without worrying too much about the twist is like telling you not to think about a pink elephant. It’s a little like the paradox presented by Takashi Miike’s 1999 splatter classic Audition — a movie best enjoyed if you don’t know it has a gnarly third act, doomed to only be seen by those who have been tipped off that it has a gnarly third act. But if you can put the big reveal out of your mind until your mind starts putting the pieces together on its own, Sugar offers plenty of sumptuous pleasures on purely superficial terms. A baby-blue Corvette. An adorable dog sidekick. Colin Farrell’s eyebrows. The noir plot, which swirls around the missing granddaughter of a Hollywood bigwig, is absolutely serviceable. And brief clips from a murderer’s row of classic film-noir movies like Kiss Me Deadly and Dead Reckoning — which are spliced into each episode — will give you stuff to add to your Criterion Channel queue. All of that makes for a perfectly agreeable time watching television. But what you’re really waiting for is your Usual Suspects moment, when all the things that seemed wrong about Sugar suddenly snap into place.
At the risk of burning off any remaining credibility I have after those puns, the closest spiritual cousin I can come up with for Sugar is John Patrick Shanley’s romantic dramedy Wild Mountain Thyme. If you know anything about that movie, you know about the ending, in which Jamie Dornan finally tells his long-suffering love interest Emily Blunt why he won’t just kiss her already: He believes he’s a honeybee. This twist came in for a lot of derision online, and understandably so. Reduced to what’s literally happening, it sounds ridiculous and asinine — like a final middle finger to the audience in a movie that already tested their patience by allowing Christopher Walken to do a horrible faux-Irish accent.
I saw Wild Mountain Thyme before “Jamie Dornan is a honeybee” was a Twitter joke, and honestly: It hit different. I’m not going to defend that movie as a misunderstood classic, but there’s something to be said for engaging with an audacious work of art without somebody’s meme clanging around in your head. Don’t worry: The twist in Sugar is not that Colin Farrell believes he’s a honeybee. But it is the kind of thing that anyone who cares about TV should experience for themselves, if only to appreciate the boldness of the swerve.
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