91É«ÇéƬ

Creator: Katie Robbins
Apple TV+

BIG eyes and heads, small mouths and noses – these are all characteristics that prime us to love baby animals. The same is true of Sunny, the eponymous star of a new comedy-drama on Apple TV+. The moment I saw her, I knew I loved her – from her wobbling, outsized head down to her gently whirring tyres.

Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura in this 10-part show) belongs to Suzie (Rashida Jones), a US expat living in Kyoto, Japan. Her husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and their son, Zen, have recently disappeared in a plane crash. While she grieves, a mysterious stranger sends her Sunny, a household robot that, to Suzie’s surprise, was designed by Masa. Suzie and Sunny eventually team up to uncover Masa’s secret life and are pulled deeper into a dangerous underworld.

I have long wished for a series that might match the talents of Sunny‘s human star, Jones, who I enjoyed as Ann Perkins in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. Her character was neglected in later seasons and then written out. Many of Jones’s recent projects, including Apple TV+’s Silo, offered her little opportunity to shine. So I am primed to look favourably on any show that uses her properly.

But Jones is terrific as Suzie, a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, who has somehow stumbled into a loving family unit. Her acerbic personality isn’t a side effect of grief – she has been off-putting and unpleasant for the best part of a decade, not least to her mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg). Pair that with Sunny’s cheery disposition and you have a classic buddy-cop dynamic. But can Suzie trust her new pal’s programming?

Sunny is, quite explicitly, a show about loneliness. Suzie has no friends to help her through her grief and is isolated as a foreigner in Japan. Masa, we discover, spent three years in hikikomori, a condition first identified in Japan where people withdraw from society. So it is heartwarming to see Suzie grow attached to Sunny.

Not that it is hard to find the robot loveable. Sunny’s pleasingly kawaii (cute) aesthetic is one of many gorgeous elements in the show: its version of a near-future Kyoto will be heaven for viewers with an eye for design or fashion. Lucy Tcherniak’s direction has a freewheeling quality that bursts with character and there’s an outstanding soundtrack of 1960s Japanese hits. The series seems to be aiming for a tone close to that of the UK hit drama Killing Eve: tart, stylish, with lots of offbeat humour.

But despite the promising parts, I found myself caught between what the show is and what it could be. We catch tantalising glimpses of deeper questions, when, for example, the show points out the errors we make in assigning value to the wrong things and the wrong people. We get attached to clothes we have outgrown and grieve for home appliances. Worse, we fall in love with difficult people and retreat from those who wish us well. These are errors in categorisation, glitches in our programming.

When Sunny asks us why Suzie pushes away her friends or picks a homebot over her family, it hits on something raw and unsolvable in us all. Yet it largely avoids that complexity in favour of simplistic takes on tech and loneliness, a lot of filler and a sprawling conspiracy with actors who lack the gravitas to pull it off. By the series’ messy conclusion, I had fallen out of love with the story Sunny had primed me to adore.

Bethan also recommends…

Based on the novels by Luke Jennings
BBC iPlayer (UK); AMC+ (US)
The first season of this thriller, written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, was practically perfect. Less so the other three, but the story of assassin Villanelle and spy Eve Polastri is intoxicating.

Creator: Joe Barton
Netflix
A Japanese police officer comes to London to find his brother, a hitman for the yakuza, long thought dead. This underworld thriller is bold and impressionistic.

Bethan Ackerley is a subeditor at New Scientist. She loves sci-fi, sitcoms and anything spooky. She is still upset about the ending of Game of Thrones. Follow her on X @‌inkerley

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