Ivan Radford | On 21, Jul 2024

Death. Love. Laughs. Conspiracies. Robots. Salads. If any of those words feel out of place, get used to that feeling: Sunny, Apple TV+’s new series, is a strangely, wilfully usual oddity that never quite shakes off its sense of weirdness. Which makes it one of the most original TV series of the year so far.

Rashida Jones stars as Suzie, an American woman in Kyoto, Japan. Her life is thrown into tragedy and chaos when her husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and son go missing in a plane crash. When she’s given a robot, Sunny (Joanna Sotomura), as company to help her grieve, she finds herself turning cyber-detective to calculate the mystery of what happened to her family. But, you know, it’s also a comedy.

The robot stems from the fact that this show takes place in the near future – and the fact that Masa wasn’t a refrigerator engineer, as Suzie thought, but actually worked for a gigantic robotics firm. Suzie is a technophobe, after her mother died in a self-driving car years ago. The arrival of Sunny, then, isn’t exactly a welcome one, and much of the show’s wonderfully prickly humour stems from their interactions.

Rashida Jones is wonderful as a woman adrift in the world. We see her and Masa’s first meeting in a silent restaurant, as Suzie seeks to retreat from the world and find some peace. Years later, she’s still retreating after her loss, while also beginning to realise that she didn’t know her husband and may have retreated too much. All this is captured by Jones in moving bursts of grief and poignant tiny gestures, and some hilariously barbed comments.

Joanna Sotomura’s Sunny gives as good as it gets, blending sarcasm, expressions borrowed from Masa, seemingly innocent remarks and inspired non-sequiturs. They’re a lovely double-act, sitting somewhere in the Venn digram of friendship, family and wary colleagues, and Suzie’s distrust drives the tone of their exchanges from amusing and sweet to unsettling, often all at once.

It’s not entirely a two-hander, though, with Judy Ongg providing a spiky and sometimes sinister presence as Masa’s hilariously unhelpful mother, Noriko. Showrunner Katie Robbins (adapting the show from the book The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan) wittily balances murder-mystery and corporate cover-ups with slick world-building, observations on our relationship with technology and AI, and an unexpected ally in a cocktail mixer called Mixxy (the scene-stealing Annie the Clumsy). Throw in tight 30-minute runtimes and you have something that’s compellingly, intentionally weird, yet doesn’t put a foot wrong in striking such a confident, unique tone. Between its dystopian chills and its darkly funny jokes, you never quite know what’s coming next – and that’s exactly where Sunny wants you.

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