This question will keep us busy for a while: Are machines better people?
Photo: Apple TV+
When Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones) finds out that her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) isn’t just a refrigerator engineer, but rather the chief developer of the very house robots she hates so much, she’s furious. And her husband’s company sends her an extremely friendly and helpful homebot with big googly eyes named Sunny after Masa and their eight-year-old son Zen supposedly died in a plane accident.
In the ten-part series “Sunny”, a wild mix of science fiction, crime, tragicomedy and pop spectacle, nothing is as it seems at first glance. At the center of the story, which takes place in the near future, is the American Suzie, who got married in Japan and is struggling to cope with everyday life in Kyoto. Her strict mother-in-law Noriko (Judy Ongg) is no help when Suzie suddenly receives news that husband Masa and son Zen are missing after a plane crash. As she investigates, there are increasing indications that something is wrong with her husband’s disappearance. What is behind his top secret research work? And did the smart technician possibly even have contacts with the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia?
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The Apple TV+ series “Sunny” has it all. The ten-part series presents a brisk narrative pace in which the culture clash between the American Suzie in Japan is staged over long stretches with a lot of irony and a lot of situational comedy. But the story also drifts into splatter again and again and, rather, convincingly creates a futuristic world full of robots and strange little rectangular mobile devices that can, among other things, translate simultaneously.
Suzie’s alienation and the way she copes with it is the real theme of this story. The woman is helped by a friend named Mixxy, a queer bartender who is wonderfully played by the Japanese YouTube star Annie The Clumsy. Suzie’s opponent Hime (You), the daughter of a dying Yakuza boss, tries to get data from Masa’s research and use it to win the battle for successor to the Yakuza leadership. Is the homebot Sunny, with whom Suzie develops such a contentious relationship, possibly a kind of supercomputer that contains all the secret data that various actors are chasing? Are Masa and his son Zen possibly still alive?
The great fear of digital technology taking on a life of its own is presented in a very refreshing and satirical way in “Sunny”. The titular robot even has nightmares and hallucinates about fighting for his survival on a grotesque Japanese television show. Does a digital machine have imagination? Can she feel anything? Suzie and the robot argue passionately about this, although the machine is by no means quiet and is also capable of a lot of irony and bitter cynicism.
Even if this idiosyncratic series sometimes slips into the slapstick-like, it still offers unique, wonderfully strange science fiction about the use of digital technology and tells the story of an alienation that is overcome with a lot of solidarity – not just from human beings. Watching Rashida Jones portray Suzie Sakamoto as both sensitive and edgy is a joy.
Available on Apple TV+
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