Because We Did Something Bad in a Past Life
Hear that dim buzzing? It’s the 20th-century pulp giants collectively rolling in their graves.
IF YOU’RE an Apple TV user, or you drift around the more movie- and TV-centric regions of the web, you’ve likely picked up that Sugar, starring Colin Farrell, is coming back for a second season on June 19, 2026.
If you’re unfamiliar with the series, and you watch the latest trailer, you’d be lulled into thinking it’s a detective series.
Spoiler alert: it’s not, at least not in the way you might think. It’s far weirder. That the trailer declines to reveal the series’ central conceit—which drove a multitude, including yours truly, insane midway through the first season—hints at producers uncomfortable with how exactly to explain this strange beast, years after its debut.
I remember my curiosity when that inaugural season rolled out. How often does a major studio (or a tech company playacting as a major studio) spend a substantial amount of money on what initially seemed like a detective TV series? The initial episodes leaned heavily into the standard tropes: Farrell in a good suit, pursuing a missing girl down the mean streets of Los Angeles at the request of a rich old man, encountering a rogues’ gallery of weirdos and toughs along the way. If that wasn’t enough to earn the attention of detective-fiction fans, this sleuth also drove a vintage Chevy Corvette, brandished the same pistol that Glenn Ford used in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (the latter given to him as a gift by his mysterious handler), and loved older noir films.
All the noir allusions are a little too on the nose, which was okay with me— it was reminiscent of hearing a bar band doing a great cover of a classic song. But as the series progressed, I found myself more than a little disconcerted by the building allusions to something larger, stranger. With every new episode came more hints that Farrell’s character wasn’t quite human, that he might be something… different.
And then came the big reveal: he was a space alien. A lonely space alien wrestling with existential angst.
(Imagine time-traveling back to the mid-20th century and submitting that note to Chandler, Wilder, pretty much any ink-stained wretch dealing in noir tropes for a living. ”Hey, ah, yeah, listen, you gotta make your hardboiled detective an alien with big feelings.” You would’ve heard their derisive snort all the way up in Malibu.)
Yet again, it was clear that entertainment executives didn’t think unadulterated detective noir would sell to a larger audience. That’s not an isolated impulse in Hollywood. Even HBO’s True Detective, which spent its first three seasons remixing old-school crime-fiction themes and ideas, tiptoed toward the supernatural in its fourth season, as if straight-up murder in an isolated patch of Arctic wasn’t intriguing enough.
But I also understand those executives’ fear: you create something that plays like an updated version of The Big Sleep, and you risk attracting only a small band of classic-movie freaks, the kind of people who quote Hammett or Chandler or Thompson at parties and expect everyone in the room to give them something other than blank looks. While there have been some interesting detective series in recent years (The Lowdown pops immediately to mind), I wouldn’t hold my breath for a straight-up, no-chaser resurgence in detective yarns.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Kolakowski is the author of several crime novels, including Where the Bones Lie, featuring PI Dash Fuller, and Love & Bullets. His work has been nominated for the Anthony and Derringer awards, and his short story “Scorpions” appeared in The Best Mystery and Suspense 2024. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Mystery Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and more.
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
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Respectfully submitted by Nick Kolakowski. This post originally appeared on Nick’s substack The Ink-Stained Wretch on May 30, 2026. Used by permission.
