Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 9 October

Sunny (Robbins, 2024)

Sunny is another of those Apple TV+ shows that has impeccable production values, a deep application of taste in the design and construction and an interest in the misapplication of technology in our human lives.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the commissioning meetings for Apple (and Amazon for that matter).

“Do we have enough content about the risks of AI, dehumanisation at the hands of automation, or general futuristic dystopias?” “Hold on, let me check my phone.”

In Sunny, Rashida Jones plays Suzie, an American woman who has decamped to Kyoto to teach English. We meet her a few years later when her husband and son have been killed in a plane crash and she is wrestling with Japanese post-disaster customs with the help of an unsympathetic mother-in-law (Judy Ongg).

When she gets home, intending to blot the pain out with alcohol, she finds a gift of a shiny iPod-inspired domestic home-help robot who introduces herself as Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura). The gift is from her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima from Drive My Car) and the first question is, did he prepare the gift knowing that the plane was going to crash? When Sunny tells Suzie that Masa designed her, Suzie is surprised – she thought Masa worked on refrigerators.

And so begins a weird and often amusing combination of Japan-noir – Suzie enlists the help of a cocktail-artist played by YouTuber Annie the Clumsy to help her and Sunny investigate – along with social satire, futurology, fish-out-of-water travelogue, yakuza violence and a mishmash of so much more.

At ten episodes Sunny feels a couple of episodes too long but they are mostly 30-40 minutes, not full TV length. One of the episodes is entirely from inside the consciousness of Sunny the robot and takes the form of one of those wacky Japanese variety game shows. Another is one of those mid-season flashbacks that explain all the mysteries we’ve seen earlier and sets up the path to the conclusion, a structure I feel we can all move on from now.

We liked this because we eat up almost anything set in Japan, the characters were different and nicely played, and the plot grew on us to the point where the “one more episode” impulse was triggered.

It did not, however, make us want a shiny white domestic robot with expressive anime eyes.

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Where to watch Sunny