Sugar, Baby Reindeer, and What It Means to Watch TV for the Twists

By wazup on May 6, 2024 Comments Closed / 40 views

Sugar, Baby Reindeer, and What It Means to Watch TV for the Twists

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Sugar, Season 1 Episode 6, “Go Home,” as well as Baby Reindeer.]

I deserve no credit for predicting the twist that comes at the end of Sugar Episode 6, “Go Home.” This is because candidly, whenever I’m watching a show where I’ve heard in advance that a twist is coming, I have one joke I make to myself: “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was aliens?”

I have said about episodes of Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, and Succession… Really, any time I’ve started watching an episode of TV with the vaguest knowledge that the episode in question will be game-changing, that’s where my mind goes. Objectively, yes, I know that if the big twist is aliens — versus a big death, which is usually what the twist is — it would fundamentally break the reality of a prestige drama. Yet I always want it to be aliens, on some small level. Because it’d be funny.

So yes, I cackled like a sicko at the end of Episode 6, when John Sugar (Colin Farrell) injects himself with the magic substance that reveals his true identity: A blue-skinned alien who’s only been pretending to be a normal human private detective all this time. In its way, the actual reveal isn’t all that shocking, because up until that point, the Sugar writers and directors have made it clear that Sugar is keeping at least one big secret from most people in his life, especially the fancy Hollywood people who have hired him to find a missing girl — Episode 6 was mostly a breaking point, building to a final scene that we all knew would reveal something.

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Yet it’s the sort of old-fashioned reveal, that in a different era, would have inspired ads warning viewers to watch “live,” in an era where “live” viewing is even a possibility… As opposed to the way today’s streaming shows might premiere at midnight PST on Friday or 9:00 p.m. PST Thursday or maybe at some nebulous time in between, because it doesn’t really matter when it’s available to stream, you’re gonna watch it when you choose to and no sooner.

Much like the idea of what it means to watch something “live,” the culture around twists on TV has changed dramatically in the streaming era: The good news is that social media users now have years of experience when it comes to understanding how to talk about spoilers online, though plenty of twists still get blown, of course. The real change from the days of TV watercooler conversation is that it’s increasingly rare for audiences to be watching the same thing at the same time, because there are very few shows these days that manage to penetrate the monoculture on a regular basis.

Baby Reindeer (Netflix)