‘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
(Originally published in The Hindu on July 18, 2024)
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 American 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…
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