Are we on the verge of Hot TV Robot Summer?
This week on HBO, Julio Torres’ delightfully, defiantly weird comedy Fantasmas is finishing up its first season, and one of the main characters is Bibo, a helpful yet pushy household robot whose secret desire is to become an actor. Now comes Apple TV’s Sunny, where the chipper but potentially troublesome robot is the title character, and core focus of the plot. One more, and it’s officially a trend!
Adapted by Katie Robbins (The Affair) from Colin O’Sullivan’s book The Dark Manual, the series takes place in an alternate near-future version of Kyoto, where American expat Suzie (Rashida Jones) is grieving the deaths of her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and their young son in an airplane crash. Stranded in a country where her grasp of the language is shaky at best, where the only person she knows well is her controlling mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg), Suzie’s life is further upended when she discovers that Masa was not, as he told her, a refrigerator designer, but the genius behind a new line of domestic robots. One of those, Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), is Masa’s posthumous gift to her, but also perhaps the key to unlocking the mystery of what he was doing with his life, and why his plane crashed.
Sunny is at various points a mystery, a psychological drama, yet another sci-fi tale of the dangers of creating artificial life, and a buddy comedy, where one of the buddies just happens to have a glowing screen for a face. Some of these modes are more exciting than others, but the overall vibe of the show, plus Rashida Jones’ lead performance, are interesting enough to compensate for the parts that don’t work.
Jones has spent most of her acting career playing the straight woman to more outsized performances, most famously as Beautiful Ann Perkins on Parks and Recreation. But she can play bigger, and funnier, when called upon, like in the silly TBS cop show parody Angie Tribeca. It’s not hard to see why she was drawn to both executive produce and star in Sunny. She gets to play the hottest of hot messes — she’s drinking wine from the bottle, while seated on the toilet, before the first episode is over — and engage in juvenile arguments with an angelic-voiced robot, and she’s very funny as Suzie lets all the filters of her pre-crash life fall away. But there’s also a real emotional core to the role, and to Jones’ performance, that makes the desire for answers about Masa (who appears frequently in flashbacks and dream sequences) feel like something the audience wants almost as much as Suzie does. She’s terrific.
So is the world-building that Robbins and her collaborators (including lead director Lucy Tcherniak) do in presenting this ever-so-slightly off-kilter version of Japan, where robots like Sunny don’t seem the slightest bit of out of place. In one episode, a character tries to untangle a deep-rooted mental issue by imagining themselves as the contestant on a Japanese game show, and it makes as much emotional sense as everything else.
That episode is also one of several from late in the season devoted to explaining the show’s byzantine plot, which involves both Masa’s secretive electronics company and a war between local Yakuza factions. It’s less than ideal to have to pause the story for so long just so the audience might finally understand what’s happening; it’s a credit to Robbins and company that they let Suzie express her own impatience with things after a while, because most viewers will more than relate by then. But there are also some moments of genuinely thrilling suspense towards the end of the season, and the relationship between Suzie and Sunny grows deep and compelling enough to justify the season-ending cliffhanger designed to set up additional installments. With Jones playing at the bitterest, most sarcastic end of her range, Sunny is an odd and dryly funny treat.
The first two episodes of Sunny are streaming now on Apple TV+, with additional installments releasing weekly. I’ve seen all 10 episodes.
Michaela Coel in ‘The Christophers.’Claudette Barius/NEON
