Sugar review – Colin Farrell’s detective show is a luxurious labyrinth of noir

Each episode of this PI drama’s second season is a half-hour haze suffused with melancholy and distressed urban beauty. It’s the kind of show that could only exist on Apple TV

Getting a TV show made isn’t easy. OK, so you’ve got an interesting idea and some good scripts – but a network or streaming platform will have many further questions. How much will it cost to make, which age/demographic will enjoy it, can it be distilled in a grabby one-line summary, could it recoup investment by running to multiple seasons? Nobody’s going to take a punt on your kooky pet project and risk losing money.

At least that’s the theory, but Apple TV seems happy to commission shows having ticked none of the above boxes. Pound for pound – that is, ignoring the overwhelming volume of Netflix shows – it’s probably the best streamer in the game, having gambled and won on Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, The Studio, For All Mankind and Widow’s Bay. But it also has a stable of oddball charmers that work in a moseying sort of way – Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed and Margo’s Got Money Troubles being two recent ones – and a slew of baffling misfires like Government Cheese and Hello Tomorrow! that have popped up, done a thing nobody understood and disappeared again. You don’t know what you’ll get with a new Apple show, but it’s likely to be something nobody else would green-light, and they’d often be right.
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