Rashida Jones Befriends a Robot in Apple TV+ Series

Say this for Apple TV+’s originals: They have a tendency to look nice, and Sunny, its newest sci-fi dramedy, is not any exception. Its Kyoto setting is replete with plush jewel tones and tasteful woods. Its characters are stylish in Uniqlo-by-way-of-Her separates. Its robots are rendered in pleasant bulbous figures and vivid emoji-like expressions. A cool ’60s soundtrack completes the vaguely retro vibe.

However not the entire platform’s choices really feel as wealthy narratively as they appear visually — and sadly, that’s true of Sunny too. It’s not a foul time, per se; a twisty thriller, a colourful ensemble and the occasional stylistic large swing maintain its ten 30ish-minute episodes transferring painlessly sufficient. It’s only a vaguely disappointing one, higher at suggesting emotional and thematic depths than plumbing them.

Sunny‘s lonely heroine is Suzie (Rashida Jones), who begins the collection drowning in grief over the lack of her husband, Masa (Drive My Automobile‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima), and their younger son in a aircraft crash. If the current incident has compounded her unhappiness, although, it’s clearly not the one supply of it. Though Suzie has lived in Japan for a decade, she speaks solely English. The one particular person she has left in her life is Noriko (Judy Ongg), her disdainful mother-in-law. Her acknowledged excuse is that dyslexia makes it troublesome for her to study Japanese, which in flip makes it troublesome for her to fulfill folks. But her prickly demeanor suggests she would possibly merely be extra comfy enjoying the perpetual foreigner, to whom nothing is due and of whom nothing is predicted.

Her mourning stays solitary solely so lengthy, nonetheless. One evening, a mysterious gentleman (Jun Kunimura) drops off Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), a homebot he says Masa had designed particularly for Suzie — to her shock, since she’d had no concept Masa labored in robotics to start with, and to her displeasure, since she’s lengthy hated robots. Chipper and caring as Sunny appears, Suzie’s distrust may not be totally with out cause: The collection opens with the unsettling sight of a droid beating a person to dying. Nonetheless, Suzie’s distaste is quickly outweighed by her curiosity, as she grows more and more satisfied that Sunny is the important thing to discovering out who her husband actually was, what he was actually as much as and what occurred to him.

Creator Katie Robbins (adapting The Darkish Handbook by Colin O’Sullivan) sends the duo to intriguingly unusual corners of Kyoto, from a Severance-esque basement lab to an underground robotic struggle membership, and Sunny‘s best attraction lies within the oddballs they encounter alongside the way in which. You is a scene-stealer as Himé, a platinum-bobbed yakuza first launched getting a manicure whereas her henchmen torture a person a couple of ft away. Annie the clumsy provides a disarming heat as Mixxy, a youthful bartender who turns into quick pals with Suzie over robust drinks and flippantly flirty chitchat.

At instances, the present’s affected quirk sits oddly towards Suzie’s uncooked distress; Noriko will get a late-season arc that performs extra like that of a bored empty-nester than a mom mourning her solely baby and grandchild. However the entire characters ultimately reveal a loneliness to echo Suzie’s — and most, in several methods, come to see Sunny as a salve or an answer.

In the meantime, with every new clue, Suzie is compelled to rethink the recollections of a person she’d beforehand thought was “simply good.” Sunny‘s flashbacks re-edit themselves together with her moods, so {that a} romantic night replays as a colder interrogation or an earthly bedtime change is revisited in an angrier, extra ominous tone. Generally, she remembers her husband because the tender partner and devoted father she knew him to be; at others, she imagines him because the cold-blooded killer she now fears he was. Nijishima wears every model of Masa with equal conviction, in order that we, like Suzie, can not start to guess the sort of man he really was.

But when Masa’s unknowability is by design, it additionally displays Sunny‘s most basic shortcoming: an inclination to maintain everybody at arm’s size. In his case, it’s troublesome to really feel the total weight of Suzie’s loss once we get solely the barest glimpses of what their bond was like in life. In Mixxy’s, we study loads of enjoyable information (she has a bald spot on her head! She was raised on a farm by hippies!) however not a lot concerning the psychology that evokes her to dive headfirst right into a harmful mission involving a girl she’s simply met. Himé’s yakuza energy struggles bore when not one of the different folks concerned register as memorable characters anyway.

Even Suzie comes throughout as a cipher. Jones is superb at enjoying Suzie’s dourness, refusing to fairly up the character’s ache or tone down her jagged fury. However different elements of her character, like her bossiness, appear to come back and go along with the wants of the plot.

In the meantime, Sunny doesn’t have significantly a lot to say concerning the prospects or pitfalls of the futuristic tech at its heart. “His objective wasn’t in educating robots to find their humanity. It was in how they might assist us uncover ours,” a person says of an excellent roboticist he as soon as knew. The collection, likewise, is usually concerned about Sunny as a software for bringing folks collectively or turning them towards one another — such that even an episode set totally within the recesses of her thoughts (styled, audaciously, as a garish and goofy recreation present) revolves totally round Sunny’s utility or hurt to the folks round her.

Not each sci-fi thriller must be Blade Runner, in fact, simply as not each dramedy must be an intimate character research. But when Sunny represents a heretofore unseen frontier of the bond between girl and machine, Sunny is extra equal to a smooth new gadget which may look cool in your desk, however doesn’t fairly reside as much as the potential you imagined whenever you introduced it dwelling.