Apple TV is bringing back Sugar on Friday, and the second season feels like a reset. Colin Farrell returns as John Sugar, the alien detective at the center of the show, but the new run is lighter, less perverse and far less mannered than the first season.
That change matters because the series began as something deliberately hard to read. Farrell’s John Sugar moved through the world like a man who had stepped out of another planet and never quite learned the local rules: he can speak any language, drink as much as he wants without getting drunk, and still gets thrown by cinnamon. He also lives in a bungalow in a high-end Los Angeles hotel, drives a Nassau Blue 1966 convertible Corvette and keeps making friends with cab drivers, tour guides and security guards. The role is built around a soft-spoken watcher who seems closer to the strange visitor in The Man Who Fell to Earth than to Sam Spade.
The first season leaned hard into that unease. Fernando Meirelles directed it, and the visual style was described as eccentric, overdirected and off-putting. The late reveal that John Sugar is an alien was part of that problem; the twist arrived after the show had already asked viewers to sit through a lot of tics and detours. The second season changes the balance. Sam Catlin has taken over as showrunner from Mark Protosevich, Marshall Adams is now the director of photography, and the camerawork and editing have settled down. The result is a series that still knows its central gimmick, but no longer seems determined to hide behind it.
Farrell gives that reset a little gravity of its own. He narrates in a soft voice, and the character’s habits now feel more controlled than ornamental: Sugar reads American Cinematographer, takes the Paramount studio tour and then takes it again, and buys a house in the Hollywood Hills so he can spy on a dodgy character from Season 1. The details are still odd, but they are no longer stacked so aggressively that they stop the story cold.
That is the tension running through the new season. The first run wanted to turn a detective story into a puzzle box with too many mirrors; the second seems more interested in letting the character move, and in letting viewers follow him without working so hard to decode every gesture. It can be watched without having seen the first season, though an online synopsis would help. The trade-off is clear: the show gives up some of its strangeness, but it gains something the first season often lacked — momentum.
Friday’s arrival gives Sugar its real test. The question now is not whether John Sugar is an alien; that part is settled. It is whether a cleaner, calmer version of the series can hold viewers longer than the version that made itself hard to love in the first place.
