‘Sunny’ series review: Excellent television and a pensive take on humanity’s most-feared creation

With outstanding performances, pristine set designs, and Hollywood’s big-production sensibilities meeting stunning Japanese locales, ‘Sunny’ is truly top-tier television that calls for a sequel

Of all the countless Hollywood titles that have taken a crack on this fascinating sub-genre of sci-fi, Apple TV+’s latest series Sunny might just come on top as one with the most remarkable look at the complexities between humanity and its most feared creation: robots, a.k.a artificial intelligence.

Quite plot-heavy, Sunny boasts one too many ideas crammed into ten 40-minute episodes, though impressively managing to leave no stone unturned. When it begins, however, it poses a no-frills premise that you might hesitate to give in — it’s Hollywood’s run-a-mill set-up, quite reminiscent of I, Robot (which followed a robot named Sonny): There’s a grief-stricken protagonist, living in a world they’ve given up on, and a goody-two-shoes robot that is advanced beyond measure rises. But just with its incredible pilot episode, Katie Robbins’ series sets up a riveting storyline and an addictive atmosphere, breaks conventions, and lends many inferences for a deeper study later on.

We are first told of all that goes through the mind of Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones), a perpetually irritated, robot-phobic, grief-stricken White woman in Kyoto, Japan, whose life was upended when she lost her husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and son, Zen, in a tragic plane crash. She navigates crushing grief, infuriating pity parties, continuing anxieties of being an outsider, her dyslexia requiring an ear device to live-translate Japanese, and her nagging, control freak of a mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg).

As if her plate couldn’t get any fuller, in an eerie turn of events, a colleague of her husband brings her a home-bot, Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), whom he says her late husband — who had claimed to work at the refrigerators department — “built and left for her.” This sets Suzie on a mission of no return, in which she understands her loved one posthumously, strikes the unlikeliest of bonds with a robot, and unravels a bigger conspiracy fronted by the yakuza themselves.

A mark of a good sci-fi story, Sunny has terrific writing of the human characters — we have Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy), an intriguing sidekick who may or may not have a crush on Suzie; Noriko, who deals with her grief in a peculiar way; and the terrifying Hime (You), a blonde-haired, sweet-voiced yakuza heir who puppets Suzie and Sunny in a game of deceit. However, what stands out is how the titular robot gets humanized. Sunny, as a character puts it, is not a story about robots learning humanity, but one about humans learning humanity from robots.

And so, the robots are designed as less dangerous domestic machines with a big round head and adorable eyes. The writing humanises these robots to the extent you begin to care for Sunny deeply, especially with innumerable threats lurking around the corner. In a stroke of brilliance in writing, the first few episodes are peppered with moments where Sunny expresses alarmingly real emotions, like when she throws a packet of crispers at Mixxy. We also anticipate an eerily advanced and seemingly sentient robot like her to be the killer robot, which was glimpsed in the opening scene of the series. Treading on this thin grey line ensures we look beyond Sunny’s metal exterior.

As the story grows, the sequences that most leave an imprint on you are the ones featuring Suzie, Masa and Sunny that juxtapose timelines and memories; here, flashbacks become dreams become nightmares, often making you question fact from fiction, as you witness Suzie descend an inch lower into paranoia and the deeper pits of grief.