Rashida Jones stars in a stylish robot mystery
From ‘Shōgun’ to ‘Blue Eye Samurai’ to ‘Tokyo Vice’, Japan has been on American TV for a while. Last year, Apple TV+ introduced “Drops of God,” a live-action manga adaptation about a wine empire’s succession crisis, to viewers in the United States. Now, with “Sunny,” the new A24-produced half-hour drama starring Rashida Jones as an American housewife abroad, the company is bringing this trend in-house. A buddy mystery that pairs Jones’ Suzie Sakamoto with the title character, an intelligent “homebot” left to Suzie by her missing husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima). “Sunny” delivers a compelling, striking vision of the near future, even when the central storyline can’t quite deliver on its attempts at character-driven suspense.
“Sunny” is not animated, like “Blue Eye Samurai,” or a period piece, like “Shōgun” and “Tokyo Vice.” Instead, the show is distinguished by a soft sci-fi aesthetic reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s “Her.” Suzie, Masa and their young son live in Kyoto, a city of historic architecture and serene religious sites that contrast with dense, high-rise, neon-lit Tokyo. The location provides an ideal backdrop for the brilliant domesticity of the series’ technology, from trash-collecting droids to Game Boy-like “devices” that take the place of smartphones. “Sunny” is adapted by Katie Robbins from Colin O’Sullivan’s novel “The Dark Manual,” but its most tangible contributions come from the craft team, including production designer Shinsuke Kojima and art director Masaharu Maeda.
Suzie struggles to navigate this new reality, which is about a decade removed from ours, even before Masa and her son disappear after a suspicious plane crash. Suzie lost her mother in a self-driving car accident and is a technophobe who hates robots. (When Sunny was delivered by Masa’s colleague, she is shocked to learn that her husband spent his entire life building it. He had told her he worked on refrigerators.) Suzie also hasn’t bothered to learn Japanese , but instead relies on auto-translating earbuds. She claims that her dyslexia makes new languages challenging, but ten episodes in we begin to see Suzie’s emphasis on English as one of many misanthropic tendencies. Her way of saying goodbye to Masa at the airport is to flip him the double bird.
Nevertheless, the sudden absence of her nuclear family forces Suzie to seek help, whether it be her mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg), or her new friend Mixxy (musical comedian Annie the Clumsy), a bartender who offers to help. Suzie’s investigation into the fate of her family. Out of desperation, Suzie even relies on Sunny. Suzie’s companion, voiced by Joanna Sotomora, may resemble a more bulbous Michelin Man with an animatronic display, but she’s custom-coded by Masa with a personality as spiky as his wife’s. Gradually the two become collaborators, and even something like friends.
This dynamic is endearing and Jones performs ably opposite her anthropomorphic scene partner. (She also wears a slew of remarkable outfits, courtesy of costume designer Analucia McGorty. If Suzie has assimilated at all, it’s her fashion sense.) But “Sunny” can become distracted from its core mission, which is to explaining Suzie’s loneliness, and retroactively, marriage. The yakuza emerge as cookie-cutter villains, and while aspiring boss Hime (the mononymous actress You) dons a striking haircut, her crusade against sexism in organized crime doesn’t hold our attention. Noriko is cut off from the rest of the cast and from any possible insight into her son and her.
In the finale, the audience doesn’t have enough clarity about Suzie to fully satisfy her journey; for example, we never learn what – or who – left them in the United States. But this surreal, alternate Japan still delivers such bravura scenes as a swarm of corporate drones donning VR sets for a coordinated stretch straight out of “Severance.” The penultimate episode, a mock game show set inside Sunny’s mechanical mind, manages to combine the show’s world-building with its emotional content. Even if “Sunny” doesn’t consistently hit this sweet spot, it’s nice to know it’s there.
