Forget ‘The Penguin,’ Colin Farrell’s Best Crime Series Is a Masterpiece From Start to Finish

Published Nov 9, 2026, 2:18 PM EST

Liam Gaughan is a film and TV writer at Collider. He has been writing film reviews and news coverage for ten years. Between relentlessly adding new titles to his watchlist and attending as many screenings as he can, Liam is always watching new movies and television shows. 

In addition to reviewing, writing, and commentating on both new and old releases, Liam has interviewed talent such as Mark Wahlberg, Jesse Plemons, Sam Mendes, Billy Eichner, Dylan O'Brien, Luke Wilson, and B.J. Novak. Liam aims to get his spec scripts produced and currently writes short films and stage plays. He lives in Allentown, PA.

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It often takes a prestige television series several years to pull off a spectacular twist, such as the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, the presidential assassination in 24, or “Not Penny’s Boat” in Lost. However, Apple TV delivered one of the most baffling debut seasons ever for a drama series with Sugar, a swanky noir mystery starring Colin Farrell as a reclusive private eye.

Farrell is no stranger to making unusual television shows, and Sugar is initially somewhat surprising in how straightforward of a throwback it seems to be. However, any semblance of normalcy is completely disregarded thanks to a surprising reveal that forced its viewers to rethink everything that they had already seen.

It's Impossible To Predict Where Apple TV's 'Sugar' Is Going

Sugar begins by introducing Farrell as the titular detective Henry Sugar, who is hired by the wealthy film producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell) to find his missing granddaughter Olivia (Alien: Earth's Sydney Chandler). He teams up with Olivia’s former stepmother Melanie (Amy Ryan) to solve the case, but it is later revealed that Sugar is a blue-skinned alien who has been masking his identity after landing on Earth. While the twist comes at such a baffling moment in the season that it almost feels like a joke or dream scene, Sugar’s decision to go down a science fiction path is both rewarding in the short term and exciting for the series’ future.

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Making a shocking plot detour doesn’t always require meticulous planning (just ask M. Night Shyamalan), but Sugar was sowing the seeds for its big reveal early on. It’s established from the beginning that Sugar is a massive cinephile, as he often compares the work in his cases to classic noir films like The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown. It strikes an unusual tone because Sugar is acting like he’s in an Old Hollywood mystery, even if the world around him is more grim and realistic. Considering that Sugar’s commitment to the tropes of classic cinema is a bit too obsessive, even for a massive film buff, it makes more sense upon the realization that he has used Hollywood to develop his understanding of humanity.

Sugar has immersed himself in the language of Howard Hawks and John Huston, which is why he assumes that everyone he meets fulfills some sort of cinematic archetype. This also helps to justify why he is in Los Angeles, as he has dreamed about the “City of Angels” after seeing it in countless Golden Age classics.

As abrupt as the twist may have seemed for viewers who thought they were watching a traditional crime thriller, Sugar needed to deceive its audience in order to get them emotionally engaged with the protagonist. Asking a viewer to sympathize with an alien creature living in human skin would’ve been a difficult premise to sell, especially for an original series that doesn’t have the same degree of spectacle as other prestige projects.

However, allowing Sugar to live out his fantasy up until the point that he can’t conceal his true nature anymore makes the twist more effective, as the viewer finds out the truth around the same time that Melanie figures it out. Seeing the apathy and concern that Sugar faced before opening up to Melanie makes his struggle more palatable to an audience, and also allows the show to exist as a more standard noir before it gets into more heady territory. While some viewers may have been turned off had they known it was a sci-fi show from the beginning, they would have found it hard to stop watching after the mystery reaches its apex in the final two episodes.

Apple TV's 'Sugar' Blends the Noir and Sci-Fi Genres in an Inventive Way​​​​​​

The science fiction components are woven in cleverly in order to make Farrell’s character feel more vulnerable, but the twist does not in any way compromise the integrity of the mystery. The specific guidelines that Sugar is under regarding his relationships with other extraterrestrials give him a limited capacity to change the course of human events, as he is forced to strike out on his own in order to help Melanie.

Olivia’s relationship with her complex family history and local powerbrokers is still gripping, but the suggestion that there are powerful groups of humans that are monitoring Sugar and the other visitors from his mothership only heightens the intensity. Best of all, there is nothing about the execution of the twist or the subsequent conversions it spawns that is treated flippantly; modern entertainment has become so irony-pilled that it feels radical when something is played straight, and Farrell is the type of committed actor who isn’t afraid to be completely sincere.

'Sugar's Season 1 Finale Leaves the Door Open for More Crimes and Mysteries

Image via Apple TV+

The first season of Sugar wraps up its core mystery in a satisfying way, but leaves the door open for more stories to tell. As is often the case with old-fashioned mystery books or movies, the detective can leave one case behind before engaging with a new set of characters in their next adventure. Sugar has an intriguing hook for its next season because of the reveal that Sugar is looking for his sister, which could both add new information about his family history and offer more insight into the intentionality of his species and their interactions with humanity over the course of time.

It’s just the right amount of information needed to spin out into an exciting and unpredictable next season, which is why it is exciting that Sugar has already been renewed for Season 2. Farrell has done tremendous television work on The Penguin and True Detective, but Sugar marks the first opportunity for him to develop a role across multiple seasons.

Apple TV is ahead of its competitors when it comes to science fiction, but Sugar is so original that it doesn’t feel derivative of Severance, Foundation, Silo, For All Mankind, or Murderbot. Even with half-hour episodes, Sugar is so layered with details and subtle moments of foreshadowing that it has proven to be rewarding upon rewatch. While there’s no confirmation that it has a premise that will be sustainable, Sugar’s first season is so electrifying that it can’t be missed.

Sugar is now available to stream on Apple TV.

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  Colin Farrell

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  Miguel Sandoval

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• Scott Lawrence

  Dr. Vickers