<em>Sugar</em> and the Challenging Art of Genre Hybrids

[Spoiler warning: I’ll be talking about Sugar here. There will be spoilers. Big, big spoilers.]

There’s an exchange in the seventh episode of Sugar that raised far more existential questions for me about the show than I’d expected to have. On one level, the conversation on screen was to be expected in the penultimate episode of the debut season of a series that abounds with mysteries.  The setting was the top of a parking garage in Los Angeles. Sitting in a stunning vintage Corvette are private detective John Sugar (played by Colin Farrell) and sometime rock star Melanie Mackintosh (played by Amy Ryan).

Throughout the season thus far, the two have had a slow-burning flirtation; they’d met while Sugar tracked down Olivia Siegel, a missing member of a prominent Hollywood family. Over the course of the investigation, some secrets from Sugar’s past had—if not come to light, then at least been hinted at. And so this was, presumably, the moment when Sugar would explain everything to Melanie. The duo has just escaped from an unnerving showdown with an acquaintance of Sugar’s when she asks for more details about what, exactly, he’s been up to and what his connection is to the man who attacked them.

Sugar reveals that “[w]e’re members of a group. An organization that no one is allowed to know anything about.” He reiterates the ways in which he’s been sworn to secrecy, and about how he can’t reveal anything about his mission to anyone. And finally, Melanie puts the clues together and comes up with an answer:

Here’s the thing: It’s a good guess. We’ve seen Sugar meet with other members of this secret society, known as the Société Polyglotte Cosmopolitaine, including tech genius Ruby (played by Kirby) and university professor Henry (played by Jason Butler Harner). We know that, as befits their name, the members are gifted when it comes to languages; we know that the members have a habit of jotting down observations in Moleskine notebooks. All things being equal, “spy” is an excellent guess. It’s also incorrect; John Sugar and his cohort are, in fact, aliens.

We don’t learn too much else about them, though. When Farrell adopts his true form, he isn’t replaced with a blob of CGI but instead turns blue and bald; I’ve seen a few comparisons to Karen Gillen’s Nebula makeup in the MCU, which are pretty spot-on. As for why the aliens are on Earth, it’s not clear—there’s a reference to “preserving [their] way of life” at one point, but unlike Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, there isn’t a clearly stated motive for why the aliens are here. Or how long they’ve been here. Or how they managed to create new identities for everyone. Or why they traveled in space with this mission to begin with.

When Sugar muses about how being around humans is making him act more like a human, it’s difficult to know what he means, because we’ve never seen the society that he came from. We know that he has an absent sister and is sad about her, but that’s a far cry from an alien emotion. And, as the first season of Sugar approaches its endgame, the lack of aliens who feel alien starts to feel like a problem.

Here’s where the existential angst kicked in while watching episode seven. At that point, Melanie’s line about spies left me wondering if Sugar would have worked equally well up until that point if Sugar and company had in fact been undercover agents for some international organization. With one exception — Sugar moving at lightning speed to get out of a threatening situation in episode six — it wasn’t remotely difficult to imagine a version of this show without any science fictional elements at all. And when you have a series that’s nominally a combination of an LA noir and science fiction, having half of those genre elements feel superfluous seven episodes into an eight-episode first season is a little worrying.

The second half of Sugar’s season finale does take strides to make the case for itself as both a science fiction show and a detective show. There’s a long tradition of works that blend the two: books as stylistically different as Isaac Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw/Elijah Baley novels, Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music, and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries have all blended SF with mystery elements. And the idea of humanlike aliens living covertly among humanity also has plenty of history; it’s not hard to imagine Sugar being elevator-pitched as “The Man Who Fell to Earth meets The Long Goodbye.” Which, to be fair, is an excellent elevator pitch. I’d watch that show. But instead, we get a lot of (well-acted, admittedly) drama among the family whose paterfamilias hired Sugar to find Olivia.

It’s in the eighth episode that we finally get a few glimpses of Sugar’s home planet, via a flashback in which Sugar watches an otherworldly murmuration along with his sister Jen. Earlier in the series, John revealed that his sister was gone, and that her loss fueled the intensity of his search for Olivia. One of the other running threads in the season involved John struggling to maintain a sense of detachment—something he arguably failed at when he killed a trio of human traffickers, one of whom was unarmed at the time.

Over the course of Sugar’s search for Olivia, it becomes clear that some part of the Société Polyglotte Cosmopolitaine is interfering with his investigation. In the seventh episode, we find out the reason why: Olivia was kidnapped by the son of a powerful politician, and for Sugar to pursue the investigation further would put the aliens at risk of being revealed. Also relevant here: The kidnapper is also a serial killer with a body count in the dozens and a habit of making audio recordings of his ruminations on torture and murder, as well as his actual torturing and murdering.

It’s at this point that Sugar threatens to veer into a much more sensationalistic vein. To counterbalance that, much of the cast plays things relatively naturalistically, and that goes a long way towards keeping the mood of the show grounded. The same is true for the visuals, which abounds with natural light and shot compositions that offer a grand sense of the landscape, whether a luxury hotel or a scrapyard for airplanes.

Finally, in the second half of episode eight, Sugar—having seemingly solved the case—followed in the footsteps of countless fictional detectives and realized that he missed one critical detail. The kidnapper wasn’t working alone; there was another man in the basement with him where he went about his gruesome acts—and the other man there was Henry, one of Sugar’s alien colleagues. Which, presumably, explains how a well-connected politician became aware of the existence of aliens in the first place.

As another alien living on Earth recently pointed out, there is indeed always a twist at the end. And, look—the reveal that the hero’s sympathetic buddy is actually a much nastier customer than they’d first appeared to be is a device that’s worked well in fiction of all sorts for decades. It also brings together the mystery and science fictional elements of Sugar in a cohesive way, rather than treating them as something to run in parallel.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the last ten to fifteen minutes of Sugar’s eighth episode feature a lot of exposition. Sugar learns that Henry is responsible for taking his sister, and that she might still be alive. Henry also gives the impression that he’s about to go full serial killer on his own. As the rest of their people head back to the stars, John and Henry remain on Earth, presumably setting up a second season that’s radically different from the first and finds the two of them at odds.

While a season finale essentially blowing up the premise of a show to reveal something different at its core isn’t easy to do, it is doable; the presence of The Good Place alumnus Kirby in the cast is a reminder that it can be done well. On the other hand, “alien detective chases alien serial killer in Los Angeles” is also the premise of the 1987 film The Hidden, perhaps best known for being the non-Twin Peaks project in which Kyle MacLachlan plays an FBI agent. The Hidden is a fun movie, but it said its piece in 97 minutes.

And it’s in this potential status quo change that Sugar reveals the flaw at the heart of its attempt at genre hybridization. Where does it leave us? With a rogue detective trying to track down the bad guy who did something terrible to a woman he loved. That description could apply to dozens of shows, movies, and books. If you’re adding science fiction into the mix, that should expand the boundaries of what’s possible. The note Sugar ends on should feel limitless; instead, it seems all too constrained.