‘Sugar’: How ‘Chinatown’ Inspired Big Reveal About Olivia’s Kidnapping
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Sugar Season 1 Episode 5 “Boy in the Corner.”]
Heading into the second half of the season, Sugar begins to reveal some details about the case that has the titular private investigator (Colin Farrell) hooked.
Sugar was hired by Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell) to look into his granddaughter Olivia’s disappearance. And the investigation leads the PI to none other than her half-brother, Davy (Nathan Corddry), after he told psychopath Stallings (Eric Lange) that she knew about the accusations leveled against him by women. Why have Olivia’s kidnapping be tied into that?
During his investigation, Sugar’s become embedded into the Siegel family and learning their motivations and what’s happened to Olivia as well as what they’re covering up (including what Davy did), explains executive producer Audrey Chon. “It’s all tied together in this secret of lies that Sugar’s uncovering throughout the season,” she teases.
For executive producer Simon Kinberg, it goes back to one of the film noir classics—of which there are many references throughout the show—Chinatown. You have “Hollywood as a backdrop, Los Angeles as this beautiful on the exterior [place], but [it’s] dark and twisted and corrupt if you dig past the surface,” he explains. “And this idea that Hollywood is a corrupt and corrupting place and that family itself is not even safe, which is something that Chinatown obviously explores extraordinarily well, was always something that we wanted as our first season North Star, that the case itself is about diving into both Hollywood as a community and the Siegel family as a dysfunctional, dangerous web of broken people. And you see perhaps the person that’s most broken at the end of this episode.”
The episode ends with Davy attempting to die by suicide, though he is loaded into an ambulance, alive, after his mother (Anna Gunn) finds him. Then, Sugar confirms to Melanie (Amy Ryan) that he has a secret he can’t tell her.
What do you think Sugar’s secret is? Let us know your theories in the comments section, below.
Sugar, Fridays, Apple TV+
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