Sugar is not Colin Farrell’s first foray into serialized television as a bonafide star. But it’s a far cry from the foul, fetid persona he put forth in his most popular such work. 

John Sugar is a private investigator trying to find a woman gone missing from a family of Hollywood royalty and a man as impossibly kind as he is impossibly well-connected. If someone hits the bottle a bit too hard, Sugar tucks them in and leaves a glass of water for when they wake. His calm dominion can render docile even the most dangerous Doberman. In a lovely aside, Sugar implores an itinerant man to mend long-rotted family fences and seek shelter for himself and his dog.

Farrell also implored people to pursue their better natures in the much-lambasted high-profile second outing of True Detective. However, his physically and emotionally haggard cop, Ray Velcoro, accosted his child’s bully in the bully’s own yard and threatened to “butt-fuck (his) father with (his) mother’s headless corpse” if the taunting didn’t stop.

John Sugar would cross the street to avoid a guy like Ray Velcoro, and he’d definitely put at least two blocks between Velcoro and his classic convertible Corvette. But there’s a common melancholy at the center of both characters — each man motivated by what he’s lost, rattled by the fear of drifting away from purpose, and guided by a (perhaps misplaced) faith that justice will ultimately prevail.

As the criminally underseen Goliath was for Billy Bob Thornton, Sugar represents a fantastic fit for the full complement of Farrell’s skills — his unforced combination of charm and menace, his persuasive embodiment of everything from slicked-back sotto voce to sloppy-haired scrambling and screaming, and the sense that his character’s emotional unmooring could evolve at any moment into a full-force existential crisis. And as Goliath did from the superficial pleasures of its smartest-guy-in-the-courtroom sequences, this series from creator Mark Protosevich (The Cell) is equally unafraid to veer off in an entirely different direction.

What direction would that be? No need to spoil Sugar’s tantalizing tease across several installments. (The first two episodes land Friday on Apple TV+, with six more weekly installments to follow through May 17. All eight of the series’ episodes were provided for review.) Neither are there many clues in the series’ broad number of movie clips — ranging from 1903’s The Great Train Robbery to 1982’s The Thing with copious classics of noir and other genres in between. Sugar describes himself less as a film buff and more of an addict, and these clips are interspersed a la HBO’s Dream On amid Sugar’s many internal monologues (themselves spiked with gleeful gumshoe gumption like “Being told to fuck off is usually a sign of progress”).

Certainly, Sugar’s intense relationship with cinema factors into the series’ eventual swerve. But divulging the details would also do a disservice to the satisfying way in which Protosevich and his co-writers (Breaking Bad alum Sam Catlin among them) prioritize ideas over incidents. 

That’s not to say Sugar is deliberate, boring or stuffed with filler. Beyond a 49-minute premiere, each episode strikes a solid half-hour-ish pace. Meanwhile, each member of the supporting cast gets solid material that swerves from the sardonic to the somber. Kirby Howell-Baptiste (credited as Kirby), Amy Ryan, Nate Corddry, Dennis Boutsikaris and James Cromwell are all featured players. Meanwhile, Eric Lange cuts a fearsome figure as a loquacious psychopath on a collision course with Sugar, and an Emmy Award-winning performer from a beloved TV series of old shows up later to hit a few appropriate guest-star grace notes.

If Sugar were a network show — now or 30 years ago — its namesake’s secrets would have spilled after a couple of commercial breaks, and the series would have conveniently cornered itself into mysteries of the week. In this genuinely humanist incarnation, Sugar is upfront about why he loves his job. It’s not the opportunity to subdue or hurt bad people, although he’s certainly capable of that. It’s not the money, nevertheless good enough to live high on the hog at a swanky hotel. It’s his affinity for the moment when he returns the missing to those who love them. Three little words power his life, too: “I found them.” For him, reunion is communion.

A question that gnaws at Sugar as much as where Olivia Siegel has gone is whether anyone asking him to look really loves her. Even the violent outcome of a case in a black-and-white prologue stems from the intense fear of losing a family member. Sugar’s specialty is to close a simple loop before loss supplants love, and the crisis that the Siegel case creates lets Farrell illustrate the collapse of Sugar’s carefully compartmentalized coping mechanisms. 

Naturally, Farrell looks dapper in those Savile Row suits. And while he projects the confidence of Danny Witwer from Minority Report, there’s more of Pádraic Súilleabháin in there than you might expect. Even a moment where Sugar simply rambles to a security officer about why he’s infiltrating a home offers a wonderful window into the character’s aims and anxieties. Although the Emmys often overlook genre series — however misapplied such a label may be to something as layered as Sugar — they would be wise to consider Farrell’s work here.

Sugar’s mystery occasionally gets mired in familiar mega-rich misbehaviors. However, a thematic oomph compensates — showing how levers of privilege, greed and casual violence are pulled in perpetuity, undercutting the goodness Sugar seeks in his work and his world. Plus, the focus always returns to Sugar’s concern about the corruptibility of his compassionate nature. 

There’s also no shortage of stylish, snappy direction from Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener and 2008’s underrated Blindness). Meirelles is a perceptive filmmaker with an intuition to invert genre delights and keep them involving. (Adam Arkin, a prestige TV veteran, helms the penultimate installment.) Occasional chronological jumbles keep us askance and askew, and Meirelles delivers stunning individual shots, particularly one in the premiere featuring Cromwell’s reflection on a screen while he muses on bitter moments of the past. 

To quote Cromwell’s character near the series’ conclusion, Sugar is all about “grace and sensitivity, to the end” — simultaneously a solid detective story, an engaging character study and one of the more ambitiously original streaming series to come down the pike in a long time.