COP VS. COP. MERCILESS. MR. MAYHEM. There’s an art to coming up with good fake names for pop culture trash. Seinfeld had it, with bogus titles that nailed genre after 1990s film genre: Chunnel, Checkmate, Rochelle Rochelle, Prognosis Negative. The comics writer Grant Morrison exquisitely spoofed the compound-word and common-noun names of XXXTREME!!! grunge-era superheroes like Venom, Deadpool, and Cable in their and Keith Giffen’s parody comic Doom Force: Gridlock, Timesheet, Campfire, Spatula. And with the three titles listed at the top of this paragraph — movies produced by squirrelly sleazeball Bernie Siegel, played by Dennis Boutsikaris, a welcome face anywhere he shows up — Sugar shows it has that juice.
This episode demonstrates to Sugar that there’s more to this case than meets the eye. Take Melanie, for instance. She really seemed to bond with him instantly, and not just out of sexual attraction. He winds up meeting up with her, at her request, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where she talks about falling off the wagon after over two decades of sobriety. (Her stepdaughter Olivia’s disappearance seems to have been the catalyst.) She all but composes an epic poem in praise of John Sugar, the man who took her home and took care of her rather than taking advantage of her.
But when Sugar talks to her afterwards, she recites a lot of the same boilerplate he got earlier from Bernie, her allegedly estranged ex-husband. Bernie is a deliciously mean-spirited Hollywood caricature, an archetypal medium talent who’s legitimately very good at making bad but popular movies. This puts him on a lower tier than his father, who’s legitimately very good at making good but popular movies, as well as his ex-wives Rachel and Melanie, who appear to have been legitimately very good at making good but popular movies and music respectively.
But Bernie’s talent for schlock also puts him head and shoulders above his son Davey — ahem, David — who earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod as a kid but has spent most of his time since then losing his hair and committing covered-up sex crimes. Rather stupidly, Bernie involves David and his guy Kenny in trying to get the dirt on Sugar. Sugar sees them coming from a mile away and sets up hidden cameras all around his home, which catch the dynamic duo installing a bug while he’s out for breakfast with Bernie. Thus he learns the three are in cahoots.
I wouldn’t say Bernie is all bullshit, however. He seems sincere in his conviction that Olivia will ultimately be fine, that she’s missing because she’s sitting around high somewhere and not because of something more nefarious. “If I was her father,” says Sugar, “I’d find that concerning.” “You’re not, and I don’t!” replies Bernard, all smiles. Boutsikaris’s line reading makes it quite clear that this is true: He really isn’t worried about Olivia’s disappearance. It’s the accidental discovery of David’s crimes that worries him.
Bernie ought to reconsider which kid he’s worried about. Sugar discovers that the body in the trunk of Olivia’s car is, or was, one Clifford Carter, a real low-life suspected in the murder of his girlfriend Carmen Vasquez. So now Olivia either committed a murder or is an accessory after the fact.
Sugar has other things on his mind as well. The money he gave to that nice homeless man in the premiere went right into his veins and killed him; Sugar can do little more than beat up the guy who gave him the hot shot and then adopt the dead man’s dog. Also, we learn that the mysterious Jen of whom Olivia reminds him is, or was, his sister. Carter’s body disappears from Olivia’s trunk, with a single hair left behind as a clue. And while he doesn’t know it yet, we learn that his major domo, Ruby, is reporting on him to a third party.
And then there’s Stallings. Played by Eric Lange, who specializes in this sort of DGAF shitheel sociopath, he’s a buddy of Carter’s, and thus he pays a visit to Carmen’s sister Teresa (Cher Alvarez) and her adorable kids with his goons in tow. Apparently, Carter had evidence about Stallings’s crimes on his phone, and Stallings would like keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, Sugar determines that Carter was gonna go after Melanie as soon as he got through with Carmen.
Throughout all this, you continue to get the impression that Sugar formulated who he is through the classic films with which he is obsessed. As he talks to Olivia’s old party-girl friends, he keeps seeing himself as Humphrey Bogart — yet he also locks into Gena Rowlands’s vicious anti-Hollywood Dream Factory monologue from John Cassavetes’s Minnie and Moskowitz. He seems to be aware of the limitations a life constructed classic Hollywood archetypes.
But despite Sugar’s disposition, this is far from some kind of cozy murder mystery. Its most biting social commentary, for example, comes from the entourage surrounding Bernie as he plots to keep Davey’s sexual assaults covered up: They’re all women. So much for solidarity! This is a show well aware of how easy it is to sell out, which makes Sugar’s apparent integrity all the more remarkable.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
