Not too many comedies start off with a woman losing her husband and son in a horrific plane crash. But then not many also feature cute talking robots, Yakuza assassins and black-market sex-bot manuals. Whatever Sunny looks like, it’s not. A show about grief dressed up as an ironic sci-fi mystery, and a zany Kawaī comedy that isn’t afraid of occasional graphic murder, A24 and Apple TV+’s latest effort feels like it was made to fuck with your algorithm – and it’s one of the oddest highlights of the summer.
Take it at face value and Sunny is every sappy pet movie that’s ever been made: Rashida Jones is Suzie, an American living in Kyoto, Japan, who spirals after losing her family before begrudgingly getting a “domestic robot” called Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura) that eventually starts cheering her up. Sunny is relentlessly upbeat, and Suzie’s drunken fits of misery start to get shorter as she keeps waking up to see Sunny smiling away, cleaning up all her empties.
That probably would have been enough for a half-decent show (Jones nails a funny/sad performance here that would have lifted even the shallowest take on the same story), but Sunny has bigger plans. Firstly, we’re not too sure whether or not Suzie’s husband is even dead. A call to his phone that doesn’t go to voicemail is the first hint that Masa (Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima) might not be who we thought he was – followed by a trail of other clues that leads Suzie and Sunny into a plot full of underground robot fights, gang murders, corporate conspiracies and dark web hackers. There’s a baddie with a detachable finger (confusingly called ‘You’), an annoying and possibly deadly mother-in-law (Judy Ongg) and a plucky bartender who seems to be helping out of sheer boredom (a star-making turn from comedian and singer annie the clumsy).
There’s a touch of recent shows like Severance and Maniac to the look and tone of Sunny’s future-set Japanese underworld, but it never veers too far into sci-fi to make it easy to label. Sunny’s own design (and that of the other robots that occasionally roll into the background behind all the mad mystery-solving) feels genuine, and Sotomura lends the bot enough humanity to make you forget it’s not real. And, in fact, the longer the show goes on, the less any of the sci-fi stuff even matters – with other strands far more eccentric than a bit of casual robot-bonding.
Jones, as ever, is the perfect lead to help tie all the lose threads around something grounded and heartfelt, giving the kind of sharp deadpan performance the series needs to keep it from coming apart at the seams. Sunny is exactly the sort of show that very easily could have become a complete mess – throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, undercutting all the heavy emotions with goofy robot jokes and always feeling unbalanced in the best possible way. Shows this ambitious, weird and funny deserve to be stuck with.
‘Sunny’ is streaming on Apple TV+ from July 10