Loneliness is a killer in “Sunny,” a 10-episode Apple TV+ series premiering July 10, where the cure for alienation and unhappiness turns out to be a double-edged sword. Adapted from Colin O’Sullivan’s novel “The Dark Manual” by Katie Robbins, this half-hour dramedy is a sci-fi mystery exploring the lengths people go to be alone and the devices they create to alleviate that condition. Though it doesn’t always hold together, its uniquely askew tone and charismatic AI title character ultimately make it a puzzle worth piecing together.
“Sunny” introduces us to Suzie (Rashida Jones) during the worst day of her life. At a table beside her mother-in-law Noriko (Judy Ongg), she’s briefed by a Japanese airline official about the plane crash that has taken the life of her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen. An American expat living in Kyoto, Suzie understands this woman through an earpiece that translates her comments into English. Behind them, robots perform menial duties as Suzie is questioned about her spouse, who worked at a company called ImaTech as a designer of high-tech consumer refrigerators.
Back at their hotel, Suzie is convinced by Noriko to attend a ceremony where survivors ease their grief by crying—a process that involves calling their deceased loved ones’ cellphones to hear their voicemail messages. Strangely, Masa’s phone rings off the hook, suggesting to Noriko that perhaps his body hasn’t been found because he’s not dead. Suzie has no such hope and retreats to her house to wallow in grief-stricken solitude. To her dismay, that doesn’t last long, because she’s visited by a man named Yuki Tanaka (Jun Kunimura) who’s brought her an ImaTech homebot named Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura) that, he claims, was custom-built for her by her husband.
Though she doesn’t understand why Masa was messing with domestic automatons, she begrudgingly accepts it, only to promptly put it to sleep and store it in a closet. There’s no escaping Sunny, however, who’s soon following her around and trying to cheer her up. More puzzling is that, after deciding at the last minute to attend her husband’s company Christmas party, she sneaks into Masa’s restricted basement lab and finds a series of rooms where experiments were conducted, and one boasts bloody tread marks.
Sunny’s schizo opening has already implied that a robo-murder took place in this locale, yet the nature of that calamity remains enigmatic for much of the series’ first season. To cope with this discovery, Suzie retreats to the bar where she first met Masa. Over whiskey, she strikes up a rapport with bartender Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy), who tells her there’s a secret hacker guide known as the Dark Manual that lets owners make homebots do whatever they want. This is unnerving to Suzie and sounds potentially related to the headline-making death of Councilman Ito, who was recently crushed at home by his bot.
While Suzie initially tries to abandon Sunny, she has a change of heart after the robot performs a hand gesture that Masa used to do. This indicates that it might house secrets concerning Masa’s fatal fate, and additional sleuthing indicates that the Dark Manual is the key to unlocking them. Thus, Suzie teams with Mixxy and Sunny on a quest to track down the hacker code and, with it, answers about Zen and Masa. Of particular interest is a symbol of a wolf chasing its tail that seems to be central to accessing the Dark Manual, and which was an illustration that Masa drew as a child. These clues are the catalyst for the makeshift trio’s adventure, which is complicated by the involvement of a yakuza gang led by Hime (You), whose bigwig dad is in failing health, and who’s in a power struggle with her cousin for control of the criminal outfit.
Sunny borrows bits and pieces from various TV shows and movies, yet it has its own distinctive personality. Much of that is due to Sunny herself, a cute white bot with a giant round face screen that displays cartoonish expressions. Sunny is programmed to be an intensely cheery and helpful companion, so when she breaks from that mold and says something out of character, it proves a jarring and intriguing hint about what’s really going on. Those moments are a tad too infrequent; the proceedings would have benefited from even more amusingly unexpected behavior on the robot’s part. Still, she’s a compelling creation, and her rapport with Jones has a prickliness that contributes to the drama’s simmering tension.
For much of Sunny, Suzie is stymied not merely by circumstances but also by her dedication to being alone—a tendency that, it’s revealed, predates the plane crash. Her loneliness isn’t just a character trait; it’s the heart of Robbins’ show. That becomes apparent as Suzie digs deeper into Masa’s past as an engineer who was inspired to create this new line of homebots by his own years-long stint in depressed isolation. The series nicely balances its tender emotional concerns with its more suspenseful action, and if Suzie and Mixxy’s faint romantic sparks never ignite and its yakuza-centric material feels a tad underwritten, it compensates with sharp caustic humor.
Sunny gets a bit contrived during its final passages, especially when it comes to Noriko’s role in helping Suzie and company extricate themselves from trouble, and it’s surprising—in a somewhat unsatisfying way—that rather than wrapping up in self-contained fashion, the show ends on a cliffhanger-ish note that sets up a new narrative phase. Given that its lively compactness is part of its charm, it’s not clear that this story can sustain multiple seasons. Nonetheless, that’s a worry for another day—and doesn’t negate the jaunty appeal of this maiden outing.
As an actor and a writer, Rashida Jones has spent a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence. The use of AI was a major issue at the bargaining table during last year’s Hollywood strikes. AI is also front and center in her new series “Sunny” for Apple TV+. “My feeling today — because it changes every day — is it’s here and there’s no going back. There’s an inevitability that we have to accept,” Jones said. “We need some kind of collective ethical parameters about how we use this because it is pretty scary… It’s out of our control at this point.”
In “Sunny,” Jones plays Suzie, an expat in Japan whose husband Masa and son Zen are missing after a plane crash. She is gifted a companion robot named Sunny as a condolence gift from Masa’s employer. Suzie is shocked to discover Masa worked in robotics and programmed Sunny specifically with her in mind. She thought he worked in refrigeration technology. With Sunny at her side, Suzie begins looking into who Masa really was, compared to who she thought he was. As she delves further into the mystery, Suzie discovers that in the wrong hands, the code to creating robots like Sunny can be dangerous.
Katie Robbins adapted the series for TV from the novel “The Dark Manual” by Colin O’Sullivan. She says that while there’s an optimism to the series from the connection Suzie feels to Sunny, it’s also a cautionary tale. “What AI does in the course of this show, is help people who are turning inward and who have trouble connecting with others. It’s beautiful,” said Robbins. “But because it is human-made, there’s also tremendous potential for it to be abused and used in dangerous ways.”
The speed at which AI developed in the real world as Robbins wrote the series came as a surprise. “When I was first writing the show, I was working with an AI consultant and a roboticist and they would sort of talk about this being on the horizon. And I was like, ‘You’re crazy. This show is science fiction. This is never going to happen.’ And they were like, ‘Watch out.’ And then while we were shooting, ChatGPT came out, and as a writer, I am incredibly concerned about the capacity of generative AI.”
In Jones’ scenes, Sunny was a less-sophisticated robot in need of human help. Actor Joanna Sotomura was in a nearby tent voicing Sunny’s lines and making facial expressions the robot would mimic. “That actually gave me a little bit of relief because I was like, ‘Oh, we’re nowhere near this being an integrated part of our lives,’” Jones joked. “There was a lot of effort, both within production and post-production, to get her to feel and seem like this highly functioning thing.”
So, would Jones want to own a robot in real life? “To comfort me emotionally? No. To fold clothes and do dishes? Yes, very much so,” she quipped.
Source: The Daily Beast, The Associated Press
