"Sunny" follows a grieving woman and her domestic robot as they unravel a technological mystery.
Like it or not, artificial intelligence has wormed its way into our lives, with people using it as a shortcut for everything from day-to-day work to filmmaking to human companionship.
The latter becomes the focus of Sunny, the latest in a long line of sci-fi series from AppleTV+. (Think Severance, Silo, Foundation, and Hello, Tomorrow!) Here, a grieving woman and her domestic robot team up to solve the mysteries surrounding her husband and son's disappearance. But as they search for the truth, Sunny invites us into their burgeoning friendship. The result is a sweet, darkly fun (yet bloated) thriller that examines human loneliness and connection with a light sci-fi approach.
Adapted from Colin O'Sullivan's novel The Dark Manual, Sunny introduces us to Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones). Suzie's an American expat living in Kyoto, whose husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen (Fares Belkheir) have gone missing in a plane crash. Not long after the crash, she receives a domestic robot named Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura) that Masa designed for her at Imatech, the company he works for.
Some may read the gift of Sunny as comforting, as Sunny's near-future Japan is full of helpful homebots puttering around in the background. But for Suzie, the gesture is anything but a comfort. One, she hates robots — something Masa was very aware of. And two, she thought Masa only designed smart refrigerators. The revelation of his true line of work throws their relationship — and his disappearance — into a whole new light. What was Masa really up to at Imatech? And was his plane crash truly an accident?
Suzie and Sunny's investigation will lead take them down a winding path through robot fighting rings and gang strongholds. Not every stage of their quest is particularly interesting, though. Some diversions, such as a plot involving succession within the yakuza, overstay their welcome and feel like the result of streaming bloat. However, Sunny proves time and time again that it's at its best when it's directly focused on Sunny and Suzie's relationship — and why Sunny may have been designed in the first place.
Beyond one being a human and another being a robot, Suzie and Sunny are completely different. Suzie is anti-social and often frustrated by those around her, prickly in the wake of her family tragedy. Sunny, an impressively designed animatronic puppet with a glowing face, is her opposite, often trying to cheer Suzie up even when it's clear that's not what she wants. But how much of this behavior is down to programming, and how much is because of the genuine feeling — if any — Sunny has for Suzie?
This is one of the many questions Sunny ponders over the course of its 10 episodes, during which it focuses less on the pros and cons of AI and more on whether an authentic relationship between a human and a robot is even possible. That line of thinking isn't the most groundbreaking when it comes to sci-fi, but it does gift us a delightfully off-kilter episode late in the game that takes us inside Sunny's mind for a tour of her sense of self.
I wish Suzie had been offered a similar level of internality. Jones nails her grief and her exasperation at the world around her, but in a show that relies so much on Masa's background — even to the point of giving him a flashback episode — Suzie's comparatively spotty backstory feels like an unfortunate oversight. In key moments, though, Sunny plays with Suzie's memories in an illuminating way, incorporating her present questions about Masa into conversations she had with him in the past.
Suzie would prefer to be reclusive, but her adventures with Sunny inevitably lead her to cross paths with Sunny's fun batch of side characters, like mixologist Mixxy (annie the clumsy), Masa's mother Noriko (Judy Ongg), and aspiring yakuza head Hime (You). While Suzie's relationships with some of the above are more antagonistic, others prompt welcome, unexpected connection that she wouldn't have found without Sunny. For her part, Suzie also teaches Sunny more about how it feels to be human (even if that means Sunny picks up some unsavory hand gestures along the way).
So while Sunny is bursting with technology, including phone-like "Devices" and AR headsets, it's not actually attempting to pass judgment on AI as a whole. Instead, it's a fairly solid exploration of technology's capacity to create connection — with the help of some (maybe homicidal) robots along the way.
How to watch: Sunny is now streaming on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes available, and a new episode every Wednesday.
