Review: ‘Sugar,’ with Colin Farrell as an alien private eye, gets a new and improved second season

For whatever reason, I never reviewed the first season of “Sugar,” which I’d stopped watching before its late-season big reveal — the detective (Colin Farrell as John Sugar) is an alien. Had that happened earlier in the story I might have hung on, but strictly as a production, I’d found its brand of neo-noir to be mannered, gimmicky, obvious, overdirected (by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian director of the fine “City of Men”) and, as you may have surmised, off-putting.

This is by way of announcing that the second season arrives Friday on Apple TV and that I like it very much. The stylistic eccentricities have been dialed back, including the use of old Hollywood film clips to reflect the action and possibly the thoughts of its main character, a cinephile from space, who is both practicing and enacting the work of a private detective. He reads American Cinematographer; he takes the Paramount studio tour, then takes it again.

One might navigate the new season without having watched the first, though at least reading an online synopsis. Sam Catlin (“Preacher”) has taken over as showrunner from series creator Mark Protosevich; the tone is lighter, the plot less perverse. Under new director of photography Marshall Adams, the camerawork, formerly too quirky by half — a mishmash of lenses and film stocks and canted angles — has settled down, as has the editing, enhancing the story by letting it breathe and staying out of the way of Farrell’s singular performance — the series’ distinguishing feature and warm heart.

For all his influences, Det. Sugar is the one character who can’t easily be traced back to an earlier model. As detectives go, he’s unusually sweet, optimistic, diplomatic, willing to give a villain a way out, closer to the Man Who Fell to Earth than to Sam Spade. He loves animals, and they love him.

Farrell, who also narrates in a soft voice, often wears a look of shy incomprehension, as if a beat behind in translating the world around him, a stranger in a strange land.

As aliens go, he is also something of a lightweight, demonstrating some mild telekinetic abilities (making a tennis ball float to entertain a pack of dogs, stirring the ice cubes in his drink) and the ability to speak any language, which underscores his empathetic nature. He makes friends with cab drivers, tour guides and security guards; as an “immigrant,” he appreciates immigrants. He’ll do the dishes for a woman too grief-stricken to attend to them, explain to a man who hates his own name that it’s a reference to Bogart’s character in “Casablanca” and a sign of his mother’s love. He can drink as much alcohol as he likes — his metabolism keeps him from getting drunk — which makes him indefatigable company in a bar, but he is horribly allergic to cinnamon. Remember that, if you’re ever forced to defend yourself from an ET.

Where classic noir detectives tend to be middle-class sorts a job or two ahead of losing their office, Sugar has a lot of money, whether saved up from earlier high-priced cases — his Season 1 client is a rich old man ripped from “The Big Sleep” — or piped down from space. He wears expensive suits, lives in a bungalow in a high-end Los Angeles hotel but also buys a house in the Hollywood Hills because its view allows him to spy on a dodgy character from Season 1; and drives a Nassau Blue 1966 convertible Corvette that he blithely parks in bad neighborhoods with the top down. When the car actually is stolen in this season’s opening episode, it brings him into contact with Val (Sasha Calle, Supergirl in “The Flash” movie), a spunky, punky petty criminal who negotiates its return and whom Sugar makes his assistant; I wouldn’t say Calle is underused, but I would have liked to see more of her.

Sugar came to Earth as part of a group of “thousands,” mixing among humans incognito just to observe them, for benign alien reasons, like Starship Enterprise on its five-year mission. (We get a flashback to Sugar’s first days on Earth, before he acquired the suits and the car and settled on a profession.) At the end of Season 1, their cover being blown, and humans being famously weird when it comes to extraterrestrials — you’ve seen the movies — they return home en masse, except for Sugar. He’s still working a missing persons case of his own, looking for his sister, hopefully alive, somewhere on the planet. And he’s becoming more of an Earthman — the dangers of assimilation are a specific Season 1 plot point. On top of that, like a lot of people, he just loves L.A.

Laura Donnelly as flirtatious Charlotte in “Sugar.”

(Jason LaVeris / Apple TV)

And then there’s Charlotte (Laura Donnelly), whom he meets in the bar of his hotel; it doesn’t take a degree in postwar genre fiction to recognize that there may be something fishy, perhaps “fatale,” about her. But like Sugar, we’re content to put that question off as long as possible, in the hopes that maybe this relationship will be as uncomplicated as we’d like it to be, and a tonic for Sugar’s loneliness. (He no longer has his dog, even.) He regularly gets on the subspace shortwave looking for any others of his kind left on Earth.

The new season will get around to that question, though the alien and earthly plot lines are kept on separate tracks. Most of the time “Sugar” functions as a straightforward compelling detective story, as the protagonist hunts for Ji Moon (Raymond Lee), the missing junkie brother of Danny Moon (Jin Ha), a talented young Korean American prizefighter on the first rung of the ladder to success. (Sugar is working pro bono, not needing the money but very much needing something to do.) It brings him into the orbit of drug dealers and crooked police officers and through an array of Southland locations, including the Beverly Center — finally, a good use for that place — Koreatown, the Vista Theater and the Huntington Gardens.

While there’s nothing particularly novel about that plot, it pulls you along, and the series as a whole is orchestrated to make one care about the characters and worry over their fates. Vivid minor characters — there are pro turns from Shea Whigham, Laura San Giacomo and Mireille Enos — make the story live. All in all, a good meal that leaves no bitter aftertaste.