TV these days - is it okay to just love the car?
Colin Farrell as John Sugar in Sugar, the TV series and his 66 Corvette convertible
This isn’t a critique of the show, Sugar, currently available on Apple TV - at least that’s where I watched it. Beware, there may be some spoilers ahead…
No critique, but I was inspired to write about it and that is rare. There’s just so much absolutely pitiful shit on TV or streaming these days. And we can’t blame the pandemic. It was profoundly shite leading up to the covid shitshow and it has progressively worsened during and since. Woke content up the wazoo.
I mean, for example, the show, Sex Education starring Gillian Anderson (her being a personal favourite of mine ever since the chubby-cheeked twenties Scully graced our screens in the X-Files back in the 90’s) - Sex Education, previously a little edgy, a little risqué, a little darkly humorous and largely unapologetic, just turned into a woke virtue-signalling wank in the last season. I won’t even begin to describe it. Suffice to say, I couldn’t force myself through even one episode. It was horrendously cringeworthy - everything that is wrong with society right now. In short, they fucked it.
Sugar, on the other hand, is mysteriously and darkly engaging without resorting to schlock. I like Colin Farrell, always have - everything I’ve seen him do has had some degree of redemption and/or class about it and if not, just plain commitment to the craft. From the effete beauty of Alexander the Great
to the chronic combover in Horrible Bosses
to the plaid tracksuits, buzzcut and passive-aggressive Irish crewboss in The Gentlemen
and his total absorption as Oz Cobb in The Penguin where he is quite superb.
He’s always thoroughly convincing and seems to love his work.
Sugar is no exception. It’s a little weird, a tad obscure with cryptic suggestive scripting - something is off and that’s the point.
It resolves itself at the end of the first season with the usual optional next-season-hanger having been written in.
But all through it is this air of menacing sophistication imbued within the John Sugar character, enhanced in no small way almost incongruously by his chariot of choice - that 1966 Corvette Convertible - in metallic baby-blue…
There’s something visceral about the lines and the colour of that car - it just hooked me from the moment I saw it. the curvature, those sensual sweeping wings and the underlining of ass and face with beautifully abbreviated split chrome bumpers.
Someone was high when they designed this thing. Had to be.
Dean Winchester can obsess over Baby, his black ‘67 Chev Impala - I get it - but that blue Corvette - it’s just fucking beautiful. To the point that I had to websearch to find out what year it was, what the colour was…why? I’m not sure.
I don’t usually get this way about cars. But this one just seems to make it all so much better.
The Corvette doesn’t have a name. It probably should. Topaz works for me - shimmering iridescent electric blue, sensual, alluring and quite beautiful.
Decent shows are few and far between and this one keeps the interest alive without descending into gimmickry or gratuitous anything. There’s violence, albeit reluctant violence but no gratuitous shagging or token Farrell frontals, none of that pish.
It’s worth a watch. At least, I think so.
And then there’s the car. What a fucking car.
Watch it for that. Why not? It is a thing of profound beauty and as far from an e-vehicle as one can get. Sigh….
