Sugar is one of the best worst things I’ve seen on TV.

Ostensibly, it’s an 8-episode neo-noir set in contemporary Los Angeles, and it leans very heavily, but mostly successfully, into every noir trope. The Dashiell Hammett-styled detective, John Sugar (Colin Farrell) is a movie buff, and much of the series is his voice played over rapid cuts of classic Hollywood films, street scenes, and flashbacks as he drives the occasionally black-and-white streets of present-day L.A. in a glorious 1966 Corvette Stingray.

The writers, if occasionally a bit too preciously, really nail the noir-esque narration, and Farrell gives it a snaky, neurodivergent take that respects the tradition while creating a new angle on the psyche of the tortured private eye. The production is beautiful, but it does partake of AppleTV‘s Pixar-meets-art-film style of pandering to precocious kids who know how to spell “Kurosawa” because somebody mentioned him in a shōnen anime.

The story, for at least the first six episodes, is a tightly constructed mystery that keeps getting larger and larger, implying conspiracies within conspiracies and conspiracies competing with conspiracies. There’s a missing young woman, a Hollywood mogul with potentially dark secrets, a child star turned adult scumbag, and links to human trafficking, illicit politics, and secret organizations.

And then, late in the series, it jumps into a completely different story. One that explains all the loose ends and oddities of the early story, but which does so in the most pre-teen YA fanfic way possible. It’s so marvelously stupid that, in spite of the fact that it torpedoed the best elements of the noir story, and overlooked a number of interesting, genre-sensitive ways to bring the story together. I was glued to the set.

I won’t give away the twist but it’s very loosely comparable to watching the Harry Potter movies, and then, somewhere in the 7th film, it turns out that Harry Potter is not a wizard. He’s a Soviet spy sent to Hogwarts in order to get access to the British Prime Minister. He and the Durnsleys are long-term sleeper agents, working together to fool the wizards by using advanced Russian technology and misdirection. Still, Harry is obsessed with the Voldemort problem, and must solve it, his Soviet masters be damned.

Or maybe it’s like if you were watching Citizen Kane and it suddenly turned into H.R. Pufnstuf and everyone was ok with that because they got Rosebud back from Witchiepoo.

I mean, I’d watch that.

And if nothing else, Colin Farrell is excellent in what is the actor’s equivalent of being told that he’s playing King Lear, but King Lear is a sentient G.I. Joe figurine in a furry suit who’s addicted to fruit punch kombucha. It’s a tough job, but he does his best. Also featuring James Cromwell, Anna Gunn and Nate Corddry, who I’m pretty sure were never told what the show was really about.