Mark Protosevich

The private detective in Mark Protosevich's Sugar (2024) lives in a Los Angeles hotel, wears a sharp suit, speaks softly and keeps a shelf of old films, and the series keeps cutting to those films to show us what he is thinking. That is Protosevich in one man. He has said that a cynical view of the world is essential to any private-eye story, and that what saves the private eye is a code of honour. He writes the code with real affection. It is the world around it that gives him trouble.

He came up reading other people's scripts as a story analyst, then sold one of his own, The Cell (2000), a psychological thriller directed by Tarsem. After that came two decades of studio work, most of it on other people's material: Poseidon (2006), I Am Legend (2007), a story credit on Thor (2011) and a remake of Oldboy (2013) for Spike Lee. Of these we have reviewed only Thor, where the Asgard half works and the Earth half is thin, and a story credit is a hard thing to hold anyone to; we could not tell you which of that film's ideas are his. The others we have not reviewed, so we will say only that together they show a writer drawn to high concepts, adaptations and remakes, and one who waited a long time for something of his own.

Sugar is that something, his first television series, most of it written or co-written by him. For two hours it is nearly the thing it wants to be. Fernando Meirelles directs the opening episodes, Colin Farrell is as good as he has ever been, and the question on the poster, who is Sugar, is answered the way a good noir answers it, by watching the man work. We were happier in those two hours than we had expected to be, because Protosevich trusted the walk through the hotel and the soft voice to carry us and did not stop to explain either. That trust is rarer in television than it should be.

Then the case goes thin. The remaining six episodes spend most of their time not answering the question and the rest answering it badly, and there is a turn late on we will not describe except to say that it goes worse. Whether the same fault runs through his features we cannot say from what we have reviewed, but it is the whole shape of Sugar. The mystery is the bait and the character is the meal, and he leaves the bait in the water too long.

Watch the first two episodes of Sugar and you will see what he is for. Whether he can finish what he starts is the question a second series would have to answer, and on present evidence we would go in hoping rather than expecting.