Adapted from Colin O’Sullivan’s novel The Dark Manual, Sunny is the quintessential Apple TV+ series. Not just because it depicts the sort of future—filled with user-friendly devices housed in white cases with soft, round edges—that could have been designed by Steve Jobs himself, but because like so much of the streamer’s content, Sunny is a handsomely made series featuring A-list talent that amounts to a little less than the sum of its parts.
Created by Katie Robbins, the 10-episode series takes viewers to a near-future version of Kyoto where a grief-stricken woman named Suzie (Rashida Jones) is trying to process the loss of her husband, Masa (Nishijima Hidetoshi), and their son in a mysterious plane crash. A glimmer of hope arrives in the glowing digital display of a three-foot android, Sunny (Joanna Sotomura), that’s gifted to Suzie by the robotics company that her husband used to work for. It turns out that there’s a lot more to Masa and his disappearance than meets the eye, and Sunny may hold the key to figuring out the truth, even if she’s not quite able to access it just yet.
Sunny is a delightful bit of production design that seems to have come whirring in from an ’80s sci-fi movie, or a particularly expensive Doctor Who episode. It’s fun just watching the robot in motion, all clumsy arm movements and slow head turns, and Sotomura’s chipper line readings perfectly match the emoticon-like expressions that illuminate her face. (Eventually, we get to meet an equally entertaining Trashbot who scours the environment around him, picking up each object in turn and excitedly declaring it either “Trash!” or “Not trash!”)
Suzie is less thrilled at the prospect of teaming up with this cheerful robot, or with anyone for that matter. Unlike Sunny, she’s all sharp edges, snapping at everyone around her and meeting almost every obstacle with angry profanities. But her determination to find her family trumps that animosity, so she and Sunny embark on a search for answers that soon leads them into a maze of conflict involving corporate cover-ups, black market coders, and yakuza infighting.
Their sleuthing provides all sorts of opportunities for absurd comedy, from their interview with a neck brace-wearing cop to more outlandish incidents involving back-alley sex shops and karaoke as a means of repelling bears. Each episode is good for at least a few chuckles, especially when Suzie’s mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Onng), makes an appearance. A model homemaker with perfect manners, Noriko is appalled by the scruffy, bad-tempered woman her son married and never misses a chance to make those feelings clear. While smiling politely, of course.
The more the amateur investigators learn, the less sure Suzie is about who Masa really was. The mild-mannered tech nerd we see in flashbacks seems a long way from the cyber-genius with mob connections that she keeps hearing about throughout the show. There always seems to be something more going on behind Masa’s gentle smile, the flicker of an expression that’s just too faint for us to figure out whether it’s sadness or pain or something more sinister. He’s a charming cypher, and he makes for the most compelling mystery in the series.
Sunny’s other efforts to tug at our curiosity aren’t quite as successful. It hits us with rapid-fire flashes from Suzie’s memory as she recalls moments with Masa and imagines other versions of him that might have existed and other questions she might have asked him. But these get mixed in with things that Suzie would never have witnessed and the odd scene from another character’s memory, making it hard at times to parse what we’re being shown. Fractured memories can make for great puzzles, giving us the chance to piece things together alongside the protagonist, but here it’s sometimes unclear if all the pieces have even come from the same box.
It makes sense that Suzie would be in the misanthropic state that she’s in, what with her husband and child being presumed dead. But the heaviness of her behavior feels out of step with the kooky tone of the rest of the series, which consistently feels as if it’s struggling to fit the harrowing reality of a grieving mother into its world of back-talking robots and hapless dildo salesmen. In a later episode, someone suggests that Suzie’s grief acts as a shield protecting her from criticism, which comes across as callous given that her child was lost mere days ago.
Even in the scenes that depict her in happier times, Suzie seems to be waging a one-woman war against the world, living her whole life with her middle fingers raised, and Sunny isn’t interested in exploring why she’s that way. The problem isn’t that she’s unpleasant—many of TV’s most iconic characters are as well—but she’s unpleasant in a fairly one-dimensional way. Jones commits full-heartedly to the performance, and she seems to be really relishing the chance to tell the whole world to get fucked, but for the most part she’s only given one note to play.
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