‘Sunny’ Makes the Coming Robot Revolution Seem… Adorable?

Statistically, you aren’t watching AppleTV+ — earlier this year, Matthew Belloni’s newsletter Puck reported that viewership on the platform is just 0.29 percent, according to Nielsen — so when I tell you its sitcoms are endemically friction-free, I realize you kind of have to take my word for it. 

Having honed this opinion via immersion in, among others, The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, Palm Royale, Loot and The Big Door Prize (linked above), enduring 10 episodes of Apple’s new “dark comedy” Sunny wasn’t exactly how I wanted to kick off my summer. I guess I can’t say it pleasantly surprised me, but I definitely was not expecting that (a) one of the world’s biggest computer companies has brought us such a prickly, unsettling vision of our possible future living with A.I., and (b) that Apple has made a new comedy that isn’t allergic to conflict.

In Sunny — adapted from Colin O’Sullivan’s 2018 novel The Dark Manual — Suzie (Rashida Jones, also an executive producer) is an American woman living in Kyoto. As the series begins, her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son have just disappeared, the plane they were traveling on having crashed. Suzie’s only support is Noriko (Judy Ongg), Masa’s mother, but their relationship isn’t particularly warm. Returning home after a session with the airline’s grief counselor, Suzie finds Yuki Tanaka (Jun Kunimura) waiting for her: He worked with Masa, and has brought her a homebot Masa developed, because Masa didn’t work in his company’s refrigerator department, as he’s always given Suzie to believe; he was a roboticist. 

Suzie thinks robots are creepy and doesn’t want to live with one, but Yuki convinces Suzie to keep Sunny by saying robots are an expression of their creators, so that Sunny is, in her way, an extant piece of Masa. As Suzie spends more time with Sunny, she finds out that Masa was keeping other secrets from her, and starts to suspect that maybe the official story of his plane crash isn’t the whole truth. Sunny and Suzie’s investigation — which also draws in Mixxy (annie the clumsy), a staffer at Suzie’s favorite cocktail bar — is both deadly serious and marked by comic hijinks everywhere from Kyoto’s red-light district to a public bath to Masa’s mysterious former lab.

Suzie has lived in Japan for years, but it’s established in the series premiere that she hasn’t learned Japanese because she has dyslexia. It’s also established that she hates robots because her mother was killed by one — specifically, by a self-driving car, but it still explains why Suzie hasn’t been swept up in the homebot revolution despite their seeming ubiquity and public acceptance. It also explains why Masa wouldn’t tell her what he was actually working on. 

These are comparatively tiny story points, but they’re essential to the show’s legibility for an audience not fluent in Japanese: Suzie’s requirements in terms of Japanese translations or lessons in the finer points of Japanese culture were the same as mine, making the experience of watching seamlessly immersive. Similarly, Suzie’s anti-homebot stance — out of the norm for the show’s near-future setting — necessitates that Sunny win her over; a viewer who doesn’t live with an android housekeeper is convinced of Sunny’s usefulness at the same pace Suzie is.

Sunny’s cuteness, on the other hand, is pretty self-evident immediately: 

As voiced by Joanna Sotomura, Sunny is bubbly, enthusiastic and extremely eager to fulfill the destiny Masa made her for: to be Suzie’s friend. Everyone who interacts with Sunny notes how different her behavior is from that of other homebots — she has a distinct personality, and it’s pretty sassy. But just as Suzie’s dyslexia helps smooth over what would otherwise be cumbersome exposition, Sunny’s sweetly goofy discovery of the world drives many of the comedic moments in a show that otherwise revolves around Suzie, mired in profound depression and loneliness. 

If we didn’t know what Sunny’s normally like — her manner suggests a perky kindergarten teacher, with flashes of sarcasm — it wouldn’t be as funny when, for instance, Sunny has to talk herself into a public bath after it’s closed by acting as boring as a regular homebot.

One can’t help wondering, though, if the stealth reason for Sunny’s — and Sunny’s — existence is to soften us all up for our imminent robot dystopia. The proliferation of A.I. was a major point of contention for the actors and writers whose unions struck last year, and while they’re back at work now, we still regularly see evidence that A.I. is making the world worse, without any apparent ethical guardrails. But would we feel differently about A.I. if it looked like Sunny? According to a report in April, Apple is working on its own homebot line, so I’d love to know if any of those engineers consulted on the design of Sunny, whose white cabinet and gently rounded joints evoke an AirPod case — that is, if an AirPod case were the size of a sixth-grader and had a globe head with a cute glass face.

Without spoiling key plot points in the story Suzie’s trying to piece together, Sunny gets a lot less pro-Sunny as the season goes on. We start to see how nefarious this technology actually could be, what purposes bad actors could put it to, and even what responsibility of stewardship — maybe even parenthood! — humans owe the non-organic members of our households and society. After The Big Door Prize, I never would have guessed anyone at Apple was interested in programming that raised complex questions and saw them through their disturbing yet absurd complications, but here we are. 

Watch Sunny. Just don’t let your phone listen while you do; you could give it ideas.