Sugar is not the show you think it is. On the surface it’s the story of John Sugar, a soft-spoken, sweet-natured Los Angeles private investigator who specializes in missing persons cases after his own sister, Djen, disappeared some years before. Beneath the surface…well, it’s still all that. John really a nice guy and a good detective who misses his sister as he cruises around the thoroughfares of the City of the Angels. He’s just also a blue-eyed, blue-skinned alien.
The show’s first season ended with a second shocker: Henry (Jason Butler Harner), his best friend among the aliens among us, has gone native, driven insane by the violence of human culture. After guiding a fledgling serial killer whom John kills — violating his people’s prohibition against violence himself in the process — Henry disappears, but not before strongly imply he had something to do with Djen’s disappearance. Though their people are forced to flee the Earth after human authorities discover them somehow, Henry stays behind to kill again, and John stays behind to stop him.
We now resume the action, and nearly all of that is out the window before the opening credits roll. Like I said, this is not the show you think it is.
Taking over for the departing Mark Protosevich (who created the show) and Simon Kinberg, new showrunner Sam Catlin scraps what certainly appeared to be the plan for the show moving forward and starts from scratch. Sugar finds Henry in the very first scene — dying from suicide after despairing of the way he was “assimilated” into humanity’s follies. Henry apologizes for his actions, and for whatever happened to Djen, but does not live long enough to explain what that is. Now John has no hope of returning home and no hope of uncovering the truth about his sister, and the show has lost its raison d’être.
But Sugar has two things to fall back on, including the mystery of how his people’s existence was exposed. John suspects it has something to do with the senator father of the young serial killer he and Henry got mixed up with in Season 1. So he purchases a beautiful home in the Hills gazing down upon the good Senator’s place to continue his investigation, though we don’t learn this till the end of the episode.
Mostly, John just loves being in Los Angeles, which he returns to immediately after the debacle with Henry. (All he takes back with him is a hidden communicator unit he briefly uses to see if any other aliens stayed behind.) His bitchin’ vintage convertible, his posh hotel-suite digs, his endless collection of perfect suits, his sad-eyed love of Hollywood’s Golden Age — they’re all waiting for him upon his return. (He gave his dog to Amy Ryan’s character at the end of Season 1.)
As he reacclimates himself to the hotel, Sugar keeps making eye contact with a beautiful brunette who eventually introduces herself to him. Her name is Charlotte, “like the spider’s web.” I’m hoping we’ve got a femme fatale here, but on this show, looks can be deceiving.
Which is not to say no one is honest in Sugar’s Los Angeles. One of the episode’s funniest gags involves a young woman (Sasha Calle) who helps steal Sugar’s car, then charges him $300 bucks to get it back. (She’s got a credit card reader and everything.) Fortunately for Sugar, she turns out to be one of those trustworthy car thieves, and brings his wheels right back to him as agreed.
Sugar winds up taking his first new case on behalf of a human buddy, who’s concerned for a kid from the neighborhood, Ji Moon (Raymond Lee). Ji and his brother Danny (Jin Ha) are boxers, but Danny’s on the rise while Ji is struggling. After stealing some meds from a hospital, Ji disappears, and John spends time trying to retrace his steps through the hospital stairwell and out to the street based on the voicemail Ji left Danny while it was happening, saying something about how his pursuer “looked down on me with those fucking eyes, and I ran.” Glowing blue eyes are a hallmark of Sugar’s people, leading me to wonder if he’s already more involved in this case than he knows.
Other than the dramatic shift in the storyline away a Fugitive-style hunt for a killer, the big news here is simple: John Sugar’s Los Angeles is back. It’s a fantasy LA, a frictionless LA, an LA where you can cruise around in your perfect car in your perfect suits. It’s a place where clips from old movies help you wax philosophical about the human condition and your own place in it, as the the buildings and the neon glow in your windshield. It’s colorful place, with heavily saturated reds and blues in particular, an unusual color palette for a streaming show. (You do see it in Michael Mann films.)
It’s a place where nurses willingly incriminate themselves to help you after knowing you for all of two minutes, like you’re Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet. It’s a place where a middle-aged Irish guy like Colin Farrell can meet cute with a different beautiful middle-aged Irish (or Irish-American) lady every season and get a whole cool stylish sci-fi mystery out of it. It’s a city of immigrants, like Ji Moon, like John Sugar.
It is, in short, very much my kind of place. And if both the Season 1 twist and this Season 2 reshuffle are any indication, there’s no way to get a sense of its boundaries until you’ve been there. I’m ready to hop in.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
