Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sunny’ On Apple TV+, Where A Grieving Woman And Her Homebot Try To Find Out What Happened To Her Husband And Son

The idea that someone can program an artificial intelligence-based robot that knows everything about us and continues to learn completely freaks us the eff out. We don’t want to deal with all sides of ourselves, much less live with a digital brain that might know more about us than we know about ourselves. In a new Apple TV+ series, Rashida Jones plays a woman in a near-future version of Kyoto who is gifted a robot that her vanished husband programmed expressly for her. Yikes.

SUNNY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: People wailing and screaming, then we see a robot basing a man’s head in with a chair.

The Gist: Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones) sits with her mother-in-law Noriko (Judy Ongg) in a haze of grief as an airline representative asks her questions about what her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen (Feris Belheir) were wearing on the plane they were on, which crashed a few days prior. The idea is that they are looking for survivors, but Suzie is pretty sure that both her husband and son didn’t make it.

Having moved to Kyoto a decade ago, shortly before meeting Masa, Suzie isn’t used to Japanese rituals around death, and she can’t handle her Noriko’s longshot hope that Masa is still alive.

At her home, she is met by Yuki Tanaka (Jun Kunimura), co co-worker of Masa’s at Imatech. He brings up a gift from the company that will help her with her grief: A homebot named Sunny (Joanna Sotomura). Suzie hates homebots, and thinks they’re creepy. When Yuki tells Suzie that Masa designed this new generation of homebots, Suzie is shocked; Masa has always told us he worked on refrigerators at Imatech.

Sunny seems to be enthusiastic, but Suzie doesn’t want this bot in her life; she’d rather deal with her grief on her own. She puts Sunny to sleep, but Sunny wakes up. She stows Sunny in the closet, but the robot finds her. She tries to throw it in the river, but it’s too heavy, so she leaves it on a bridge. Sunny comes back every time.

The revelation about Masa makes her wonder what her husband has lied to her about. She goes to a holiday party at Imatech headquarters and manages to find the lab where he developed the homebots. In a brightly-colored room, she finds two dogs… and blood stains.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sunny, created by Katie Robbins based on the novel The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan, with Jones as one of the EPs, has some of the weirdness of fellow Apple series Severance with a bit of near-future Black Mirror-esque sci-fi mixed in.

Our Take: One of the things that we liked about Sunny is that Robbins and her writing staff doesn’t pussyfoot around the show’s central mystery. From the first minutes of the first episode, the notion that Masa and Zen aren’t dead — that they never got on the plane to begin with — has been presented to viewers. The only one who seemed to be convinced that they were dead was Suzie, who snidely snaps about “charred bodies” to the airline rep who is asking about what Masa was wearing.

But we’re discovering with Suzie that things aren’t what they seemed, starting with what Masa did at Imatech. Then, when Suzie drowns her sorrows at the bar she and Masa used to go to, a new bartender named Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy) talks to her about how homebots might be homicidal; a rumor is going around that the homebot of a councilman caused his death the week prior.

So this is going to play out as a conspiracy-type mystery that we’ve seen many times over the past decade, but with the darkly comic performance of Jones at its center. Jones has always been good at communicating darker emotions while being able to maintain enough self-respect to tell someone to “suck a dick” when needed, or let off a funny but sardonic line. Having her at the center of this mystery will ensure that we’ll be able to see extreme sadness living with cynicism and snarkiness, something that not many actors can pull off.

One of the aspects of the mystery that makes it a bit different is Sunny itself. Sotomura’s voice gives Sunny a much warmer presence than one might expect, and the VFX involved with the robot’s body and facial expressions complete a very watchable package. What we don’t know is a) whether the bots are programmed to kill or b) if Sunny is one of those killer bots. Those layers of mystery, with Suzie learning to trust Sunny in fits and starts, will add to what is shaping up to be a solid mystery.

Sex and Skin: None in the first two episodes, though Mixxy does talk about her homebot wearing a strap-on.

Parting Shot: After Suzie sees Sunny giving the same hand gesture Masa gave her when he wished her goodbye at the airport, Sunny tells her, “Don’t you see, Suzie? I was programmed for you!”

Sleeper Star: Judy Ongg is sneakily funny as Noriko, Masa’s mother. Her reactions to her son and grandson’s disappearance seem strange to Suzie, but we’re not sure if that’s part of the mystery or just Noriko’s method of grieving.

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a subplot that shows that one or more homebots that aren’t Sunny are watching Suzie and reporting back to a mysterious organization. Yes, that could be part of the larger conspiracy, but it proves to be a distraction in the first episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sunny presents an interesting near-future scenario where a woman questions everything she knew about her marriage and life. The mystery she investigates may end up being mundane, but the performances of Jones and Sotomura — and the relatively brief episode run times — make it a fun ride to go on.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.