Ripley and Sugar are arthouse Dad Shows
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Two shows premiere this week that are about as artistically inclined as Dad Shows can be. One is the psychological thriller limited series Ripley, out in total on Netflix today, and the other is the detective drama Sugar, which releases its first two episodes (of eight) on Apple TV+ tomorrow.
These are not brute force Dad Shows like Reacher. They’re more understated, with enigmatic main characters and bold stylistic choices (black & white for Ripley, eccentric editing for Sugar).
I would recommend either of them to anyone in the mood for a cinematic, prestige Dad Show, but Ripley in particular is very special. It’s the best show I’ve seen in 2024 so far.
The TalenDAD Mr. Ripley
The headline about Ripley is that it’s presented in striking black & white, which is almost unheard of for TV. I can’t think of another contemporary show that’s fully black & white.
Unlike shows that have done one-off black & white episodes, Ripley isn’t using it as a satirical gimmick; Steve Zaillian’s direction and Academy Award winner Robert Elswit’s cinematography are too beautiful for that. The aesthetic is reminiscent of Italian cinema of the early 1960s, evoking the time and place where Ripley is set. Ripley looks different — and better — than anything else on TV right now. The cinematography enhances the craft of everything else, too, like the seductive costume and production design and the impenetrable darkness Andrew Scott’s performance as Tom Ripley.
In the series, a wealthy New Yorker hires Ripley to travel to Italy to convince his wayward son Dickie Greenleaf to come home. But upon seeing Greenleaf’s luxurious, carefree life, Ripley decides to take it for his own. And once he has it, he’ll do anything to keep it.
Scott, in contrast to the charming performances by Alain Deloin and Matt Damon in previous adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, plays Ripley as an off-putting, anti-charismatic weirdo. Scott, who is best known as Fleabag’s Hot Priest, twists his natural Irish likability into something truly blank and disturbing, which makes the thrill of watching him pull off sociopathic schemes and get out of impossible jams even more delightfully perverse. It’s the TV trend of sympathetic scammers taken to a very uncomfortable place. “You like rooting for bad guys?” Ripley seems to say. “Well, can you root for this sick freak to get away with it? Do you want to watch an entire episode devoted to him trying to figure out how to dispose of a dead body?” (Trust me, you do. It’s terrific.)
Ripley was originally developed for Showtime, and then sold to Netflix when Showtime went into contraction mode. I get why Showtime sold it off, and I also get why Netflix isn’t giving it a full promotional push. It’s too creatively risky to compete for major Emmys, and it might be too challenging to become a mass hit. But I could also see it catching on via word-of-mouth when people find out how good it is. Harlan Coben fans might not click play on it at first, but they might if they realize it’s a tense if slow-burning thriller, not a homework assignment. We’ll see what happens.
Ripley is not a traditional Dad Show, but it has some characteristics of a prestige, HBO-style Dad Show. Dads love a competent antihero, and Tom Ripley is very, very good at what he does. He’s not exactly a Cool Guy, but he has great taste and a strange magnetism. And he’s definitely a Bad Guy.
Steve Zaillian, who writes and directs every episode, is a Dad Auteur. He won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Schindler’s List, and has also written Dad Movie classics like Clear and Present Danger, Gangs of New York, and Moneyball. His last limited series was The Night Of, a prestige Dad Show Hall of Famer. Dads appreciate craft, and Ripley has craft out the wazoo.
I give it my highest Dad Shows recommendation of Two Dads Way Up.
Ripley feels like a prestige show from an era that was at its peak only a few years ago but is already slipping away. Sugar, meanwhile, is like a prestige show from another planet.
Sugar Daddy
On the surface, Apple TV+’s Sugar is a pure Dad Show, but there’s some weird mind- and genre-bending stuff going on, too.
Colin Farrell – who is both a girl actor and a Dad Actor – plays a suave private detective in Hollywood named John Sugar who is hired by a movie producer (James Cromwell, in what has to be a nod to L.A. Confidential) to find his missing granddaughter. It’s set in the present, but Sugar loves old movies and thinks of himself as a modern-day Sam Spade. He’s friendly, though, without Spade’s sardonic edge.
Sugar is a classic Dad Show protagonist. He looks great in a suit, he drives a classic Corvette convertible, and he can drink all night without getting drunk. He’s a Cool Guy, and a genuinely nice guy. But he is capable of being a Bad Guy. He’s protective of women, and if he sees them being threatened, he will react violently. He doesn’t like hurting people, but he will do it. He’s a gentleman and a highly competent tough guy, like all dads aspire to be.
All eight episodes of Sugar are directed by City of God’s Fernando Meirelles, and he shoots with a shaky camera and cuts in a dreamy, woozy style that the show doesn’t really explain. Scenes play out in overlapping, non-chronological order, like a montage of a single moment. In one scene, Farrell starts delivering a line while he’s standing on a patio and ends it sitting in a chair on another part of the patio. And scenes are intercut with fragments from the old movies Sugar loves. The editing style is very disorienting and very distinctive.
There’s a twist in Sugar. I'm not mentioning it as a spoiler, but it comes so late in the season that I think knowing that something is coming will enrich your enjoyment of the show. Sugar starts out as a classic private detective story that pays homage to film noir and then it turns into something else, and a large part of the suspense is anticipating that turn. It’s a very strange show, and not all of its artistic provocations totally work. But it’s unique enough to be interesting. And since most of its eight episodes are only about 35 minutes long, it’s not too much of a commitment.
You know you’re living in a Golden Age of Dad Shows when you’re getting two shows like this in the same week.