On paper, Sunny looks like a perfect example of the crap habitually shovelled into the summer schedules. The powers that be think we are outside doing things in the glorious sunshine, instead of searching as desperately as ever for something to entertain us. What is wrong with these people? I bet they are the same ones who serve “a hearty salad” at summer dinner parties, instead of a proper meal, as if you don’t have a body to fuel between June and August.
Sorry, where was I? Yes! The synopsis of Sunny: grief-stricken woman in near-future Japan joins forces with robot to unravel mystery of son and husband disappearing in apparently fatal plane crash. Oh God.
Fortunately, said God occasionally grants us a boon – and the unfolding of Sunny is one. It opens with blood spattering across an orange wall as a robot lays waste the humans in the sitting room around it. We then cut to Rashida Jones as Suzie Sakamoto, an expat American who came to lick some wounds and live a quiet life alone in Japan some years before the main timeline. Instead, she met charming, gentle Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima); they married and had a son, Zen.
In a flashback, we see the couple’s meet-cute in one of Japan’s silent restaurants (what a wonderful, wonderful country). Its quirky credibility is emblematic of the gently unpredictable and genre-spanning show – enough to keep you on your toes, never enough to make you roll your eyes.
After Masa and Zen disappear, Yuki, a senior colleague from the giant tech firm for which Masa worked as a refrigeration engineer, delivers a “homebot” called Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura) as a condolence gift of sorts. This is no ordinary homebot, Yuki explains, but one Masa programmed especially for her. Suzie begins to think that her husband may not have been a refrigeration engineer after all.
Suzie is a technophobe who only gradually unbends towards Sunny. “A robot killed my mother,” she tells an official. “It was a self-driving car,” says her mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg). “Human error was named as the cause.” Noriko’s role in the story goes beyond dropping poisonous bon mots, but they are her speciality.
To the comedy, the sci-fi and the odd-couple premise is added a conspiracy thriller. Suzie finds details about her husband’s life and disappearance that do not add up. At the office party she attends reluctantly as Masa’s widow, she meets one of his underlings, who talks of her mild-mannered husband with frightened awe. On escaping down a back stairwell, she finds a series of rooms called the “Sakamoto Incubator”. One of them contains blood stains and the orange wall we saw earlier.
Sunny is a profoundly confident show. It moves at a leisurely pace – perhaps a touch too leisurely for some – and treads all manner of boundaries without a misstep. It considers the apparent impossibility of truly knowing another person, as well as grief and loneliness (as a younger man, Masa lived as a hikikomori, one of the estimated 1 million people, mostly men, who have withdrawn from Japanese society; he and Suzie bond over their shared understanding of the need for solitude).
It also interrogates modern concerns, such as the potential of AI for good and ill, alongside all the twisty plotting and clues required for a conspiracy thriller. A chance meeting in a cocktail bar with a waitress, Mixxy (played by the songwriter and YouTube personality Annie the Clumsy, who acquits herself very well, so get that look off your face), provides a bridge to the dangerous world of bot-hacking and draws Suzie and Sunny deeper into the mystery of the plane crash and of other deaths. They are also secretly surveilled by mysterious men and attract the attention of the criminal underworld, led by a terrifying platinum blond psychopath called Hime (played by the actor You), who also seems to have known Masa well enough to turn up at his funeral.
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It sounds like a lot, but Sunny stays firmly in control of itself and never sprawls. I suspect it is intended to scratch the Severance itch while we wait for the new series; it probably will. But it is undoubtedly its own thing – and a very good one, too.
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Sunny is on Apple TV+ now