Generally speaking, we don’t cover TV here at Letterboxd (well, not yet...), but if there were ever a series that demanded our attention, it is Mark Protosevich’s new private-eye drama Sugar, which is positively oozing with a deep love for all things cinema.

It stars Colin Farrell as John Sugar, a high-end private eye with a mysterious past who, against the wishes of his handler Ruby (played by Kirby, now a mononym after previously being credited as Kirby Howell-Baptiste), agrees to take on a job from a high-powered Hollywood mogul (James Cromwell, channeling Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye and John Huston in both Chinatown and real life), whose beloved granddaughter is missing.

In addition to taking place in Los Angeles, and concerning a family that includes three generations of (fictional) Hollywood talent, Sugar really sells its celluloid bonafides by having its titular character be a total movie obsessive. He is both in a film-noir story and always talking about film noir. Although highly adept at contending with the messiness of contemporary criminality, Sugar seems to take all his cues from old movies.

In the first episode, he tucks a drunk character into bed in front of a television showing the Kirk Douglas and Barbara Stanwyck classic The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, quietly whispering, “Oh, you’re in for a treat.” In episode two, he goes to see John Cassavetes’ 1971 classic Minnie and Moskowitz in a theater. The only thing missing is him logging the film on his Letterboxd .

“I always loved movies, but in my teens and my early twenties—these were the days of revival houses—I was going all over Chicago to try to see as many movies as possible,” reflects Protosevich. “God, I probably saw at least six films a week, and most of them were at revival theaters. I was hungry to know about all these different directors that I had read about. [After hearing that Rainier Werner] Fassbinder was influenced by Douglas Sirk, [I thought], let me see as many Douglas Sirk films as I can.

“That was just something I was excited by, and I don’t know if there’s that [today]. I love it when I meet a young writer or young filmmaker who does have that appreciation for it. I know they’re out there; I’ve met many of them, but I wish it was there for more people. Who knows, maybe the show will make some people curious about some of the references used in the show. If some of them end up watching The Night of the Hunter for the first time, I’ll be absolutely thrilled.”

We were naturally keen to interrogate Protosevich about all the old movie clips scattered throughout the series, many of which artfully reflect the events being depicted, but he explains that the scenes weren’t actually part of his original conception, and were inserted by editor Fernando Stutz, a longtime collaborator of Oscar-nominated Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, who directed half of Sugar’s episodes.

“I thought it was a brilliant idea. I loved seeing those clips, and I think it’ll turn people on to a lot of those movies,” says Protosevich. “Fernando Stutz and Fernando Meirelles were the ones making those decisions during the editing process. I have to credit those guys for making a lot of those selections, and it was almost psychic at times because they picked a lot of my favorite films… In of private-eye films, I would throw in Chinatown, of course. Kiss Me Deadly is also a favorite, and Night Moves, the Arthur Penn movie.”

Now we’re talking. Sugar knowingly exists in a long tradition of private-eye pictures set in Los Angeles, and the first film Protosevich cites as a major influence is Murder, My Sweet, the 1944 adaptation of novelist Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, starring Dick Powell (until then best known for light comedic roles) as legendary private eye Philip Marlowe.

“My favorite private detective film noir,” enthuses Protosevich. “I will watch that movie two or three times a year—I’m that in love with it… It’s almost like textbook noir lighting and compositions. The private detective’s office, the neon signs, the shadows. The way they approached it from a visual standpoint I have a great affinity for. I like Dick Powell in it. He’s a very charming, funny, self-effacing Marlowe. There’s something kind of vulnerable about him; he’s not what people think of as a tough leading man. I’m a big Claire Trevor fan. I think she often gets forgotten a bit in of the great actresses of that period. I think she’s really wonderful.”

“I think a cynical perspective of the world is essential in any private-eye story,” Protosevich muses. “But… they have this code of honor, [like] Colin’s character in the show. A big thing about this for me was writing something about someone who’s good, who tries to do the right thing, who is capable of violence, but doesn’t like violence, but can show kindness and empathy and understanding of people. You’re taking this noble guy who realizes that the world isn’t a noble place… The world doesn’t obey the same kind of moral principles that he does. He’s resigned himself to that.”

Robert Altman’s laconic 1973 Chandler adaptation, The Long Goodbye, also casts a long shadow over Sugar. “What I really liked about that film, and this is something we talked about when making the show, is we didn’t want it to look and feel like a traditional film noir,” says Protosevich. “[The Long Goodbye] was a big influence in of the Sterling Hayden character and this culture of eccentric, creative people in the LA community with money and their secrets and their demons,” he continues. “I reading that Robert Altman would refer to the Marlowe character as ‘Rip Van Marlowe’, as if he were a man from the 1930s or ’40s who suddenly found himself in 1970s LA, and what would that be like for someone like that?”

Sugar additionally illustrates how much fun it can be to live in Los Angeles if you’re a fan of Hollywood lore. “I’m very fond of films set in LA, where LA is almost a character,” says Protosevich. “Specifically, Chinatown, L.A. Confidential and The Long Goodbye. I live on the East Coast now, but I lived in LA for a long time. There’s no other place like it, for better or worse. It was always essential for me to set the series there… I also wanted it to involve the movies, and the movie business and a family that had a movie history.”

Filling out that movie history proved to be one of the most enjoyable—and film nerdy—aspects of making Sugar for Protosevich. “A fun thing for me to do was to create the fictitious films that the James Cromwell character had made and the films that his wife [fictitious starlet Lorraine Everly, played by Ruby Lewis] was in,” he shares. “In my own mind, I created storylines for all those films that James Cromwell did so that they fit into the time period that he would have been active as a producer.”

In one episode, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz cameos as himself, presenting a retrospective screening of a particular classic feature produced by Cromwell’s character. We get to see a scene from the Lorraine Everly movie in question play out, and its look and feel are note-perfect. “It was fun writing that [fictional] film, trying to put myself into the mind of a screenwriter of that period so that it did feel like it’s something that could have existed from that time,” says Protosevich.

The result is possibly the most Letterboxd-friendly TV show of all time. “That love of film noir was a main driving force for me in this… I’m a film nerd, so I hope others of my kind enjoy it too,” concludes Protosevich.