After securing the rights in a competitive bidding war in December 2021, Apple TV+ on Thursday announced that it has given a series order to Sugar, a new show from creator Mark Protosevich, starring Colin Farrell. Plot details are thin at the moment, but Sugar has been described in a Variety report as a genre-bending private detective story set in Los Angeles. Farrell previously played a detective on the small screen in the second season of HBO’s True Detective.
He will also serve as executive producer, alongside Protosevich, who is best known for having co-written I Am Legend and adapting Spike Lee’s poorly received Oldboy remake. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (City of God) is attached to direct. Meirelles also serves as executive producer alongside Simon Kinberg (X-Men films, Deadpool films, The Martian), Audrey Chon (Invasion, The Twilight Zone), Scott Greenberg (The Guilty), and Chip Vucelich.
Sugar is the second show that Kinberg has set up at Apple through his Genre Films banner, after having essentially run the X-Men franchise into the ground with his poorly-received Dark Phoenix. His last film as director was the box office bomb The 355. Kinberg’s other Apple show is Invasion, which recently received a second season renewal.
This is also the second streaming series that Farrell has set up in recent months, after the Penguin-centric spinoff to The Batman. Described as a Scarface-like gangster story, the Penguin show is one of two HBO Max spinoffs inspired by director Matt Reeves’ blockbuster superhero film, which introduced Robert Pattinson’s version of the Dark Knight. Farrell truly understood the assignment in The Batman, bringing some real ‘40s Warner Bros. gangster energy to his performance as Oswald Cobblepot, aka The Penguin.
Farrell also recently starred in director Andrew Haigh’s BBC Two series The North Water, alongside Jack O’Connell and Stephen Graham. Later this year, he’ll reunite with his In Bruges director Martin McDonagh on The Banshees of Inisherin, and will star in director Ron Howard’s Thailand cave rescue drama Thirteen Lives.
Apple is having arguably its best-ever year, with multiple acclaimed shows such as The Afterparty, Severance, and Pachinko already available. It also became the first streamer to win a Best Picture Oscar with CODA. Next up, it has the Sundance hit Cha Cha Real Smooth lined up for release next Friday, followed by the Taron Egerton miniseries Black Bird on July 8.
Sugar does not yet have a release date. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
