Move Over “Severance,” Apple TV+'s “Sunny” Offers A Refreshing, Nuanced Take On Artificial Intelligence

Starring Rashida Jones and Hidetoshi Nishijima, Apple TV has combined forces with iconic independent production company A24 to produce its newest gripping meditation on our future with artificial intelligence. Don’t be fooled, though. Sunny is more than just your standard serviceable gritty thriller about the rise of the machines. Its stylized, niche take on our technological future is just the right blend of cautionary nuance, biting wit, and exploration of the nature of consciousness and morality.

This Sci-Fi Mystery Is a Biting Social Commentary on Connection, Culture, and Humanity

Marketed as a comedy drama, Sunny is more accurately defined as a sci-fi dark comedy mystery-thriller that taps into prescient issues like pseudo connection as facilitated by robots, grief, isolation, and cultural identity. It combines the machinations of Black Mirror with the philosophical introspection of Severance and the vibes-based, alluring visuals of Lost in Translation. The show’s retro-futuristic tech design is as if Apple products were transplanted into a ‘60s version of post-cyberpunk Japan. Kyoto makes for the perfect setting to tackle its ambitious story, filled with intrigue, conspiracies, surveillance, robots as friends, robots as murderers, loneliness, and grief, all interwoven through contemporary issues that plague Japanese society.

Adapted from Colin O'Sullivan's novel The Dark Manual, Sunny follows American expat Suzie Sakamoto's (Rashida Jones) journey through grief after her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen are presumed dead in a plane crash. Jones shines in a career-defining gritty performance that finally gives her the space to tap into the full range of her acting chops. Her cynical pessimism contrasted with her lighthearted quibbling with her homebot creates a darkly humorous but relatable tone. Her performance is reminiscent of Kristin Wiig’s depiction of Annie Walker in Bridesmaids, complete with existential crises, self-loathing, and all. 

Following the loss of her husband and son, Suzie is gifted a homebot from ImaTech, the robotics company her husband worked for, as consolation for her loss. Robophobic Suzie is apprehensive, if not hostile to the idea of accepting a domestic droid into her home (not the least because her mother was killed by a self-driving car), despite their mainstay in most contemporary Japanese homes. More importantly, isolation isn’t anything Suzie wants refuge from; if anything, it’s why she came to Japan in the first place, enticed by the hikikomori lifestyle she read about in an article. More than one million Japanese men identify as hikikomori – a voluntary withdrawal from society, typically holed up in their homes for extended periods of time and plagued with loneliness. Advancements in tech and pseudo-connection through virtual worlds can further enable this descent into isolation.

As fate would have it, Suzie’s planned loneliness in Japan as escapism from her home troubles led her to meet her husband, Masa. His anecdotes about his own experience of falling into a two year stint with hikikomori reveal a uniquely American ignorance in romanticizing what is an unfortunate plight for those left behind in Japanese society. He suggests that Suzie doesn’t know what loneliness is. This hint of cultural tone deafness is a recurring theme and the source of significant friction between Suzie and her mother-in-law, Noriko. 

Suzie, who has refused to learn Japanese in the past 10 years she has lived in Japan and failed to make any Japanese friends, suggests some refusal to fully assimilate into Japanese culture. Suzie and Noriko’s contentious relationship is fueled by a difference in values and cultural backgrounds. As they continually butt heads, Noriko makes remarks like, “Of course, you’re always right,” disillusioned with the lack of respect for elders that is characteristic of Japanese society.

The Palpable Fear of the Machine 

In the show’s introductory scene, we’re thrown into a fit of chaos characterized by panic, alarms blaring, people frantically sprinting, and a man screaming “I love you!” and pleading for a robot to stop. Seconds later, he is bludgeoned to death by the robot referred to as #17, his blood spattered across the yellow carpeting. Another man’s voice is heard reassuring the others, “It will be fine. No one will know.” This is our first look into the sprawling intrigue that envelops the series. Who is the murderous robot? Why did it kill someone? Who is the man covering it up?

Then we see Suzie thrust into an investigation of the plane crash while contending with the horrors of what’s happened to her family. She’s plagued by mental flashbacks of their last encounters as she depressingly chews on Christmas cookies and answers questions about what they were wearing when she last saw them. The Christmas festivities, contrasted with the grief of losing her family, highlights her feelings of dissociation. Surrounded by the sorrow of other grieving families, her attitude is by contrast much more cynical, sarcastic, and lacking in vulnerability. This tendency toward sarcasm seems to be Suzie’s method of coping with grief. It seems to be how she copes with everything. While the others cry, she makes off-color comments about charred bodies and gets in a pissing contest with her mother-in-law over who can better recall details about Masa’s and Zen’s garments.

Through this one scene, we learn a lot: Suzie doesn't speak Japanese, in-universe earpiece technology auto-translates foreign languages in real-time, and the relationship between Suzie and Noriko is somewhat contentious. We get a glimpse into their dynamic – Suzie is the irrevent, inappropriate American who ignores social boundaries and has no respect for elders, and Noriko is the traditional Japanese mother whose son is her pride and joy. We get a sense that there’s not only tension between their two drastically different worldviews, but also an air of competition. It’s a social commentary on the patriarchal family structure in Japan that has historically led to tension between wife and mother-in-law, but here exacerbated by Suzie’s American background.

After learning that her husband, whom she believed to merely work in refrigerators, actually programs homebots, Suzie is informed that this isn’t just any robot. Sunny is an advanced homebot that was programmed by her husband specifically for her. In such circumstances, Sunny acts as an extension of Masa. In one fell swoop, Suzie is hit with a new wave of grief all over again; this time not just for the loss of her family, but the loss of who she believed her husband was for the 10 years they were together. Forced to reckon with the burden of this knowledge in his absence, and with the unwelcome, looming presence of a presumptuous homebot that boasts to fill the void of her family, Suzie’s world is turned upside down again.

She accepts the gift reluctantly and only after a brief display of emotional warfare. Her husband’s work colleague Yuki challenges Suzie’s remark about robots being creepy, positing that robots are “extensions of their creators” and suggests Masa would take great comfort in her having Sunny. This easter egg, along with Sunny’s mannerisms bearing an incredible likeness to the husband she so desperately misses, makes rejecting Sunny feel like rejecting Masa, so she reluctantly obliges. Sunny anticipates when Suzie is going to sit down, pulling out a chair for her. She knows that she hates bananas. That she loves to run. That it’s been difficult for her to make friends in Japan. Sunny is programmed to identify all her little idiosyncrasies, much like a spouse would. Even after accepting the homebot, Suzie is unnerved by its presence, but captivated by the easter eggs of Masa’ personality that are ingrained within it. 

She orders it to go to sleep, but it continues to awaken, often coming to her aid, explaining she was created to adapt to Suzie’s needs. Suzie is suspicious of her just like she is of fellow humans. Skeptical of its intentions, she raises a bat to its mechanical body, but before she can take a swing, it weaponizes Suzie’s grief against her for survival, blowing an identical butterfly kiss that Suzie and Masa exchanged with one another whenever they parted ways. Suzie would pretend to catch the kiss and return an irreverent gesture – an idiosyncratic detail that pays off at the end of the season. 

Sunny Uses Artificial Intelligence to Interrogate the Human Need for Connection

Emotionally disarmed, Suzie is defeated. She can’t destroy the homebot, but can’t live with it, either. Resigning herself to her chair, she mutters, “do that again,” “again,” and “again,” watching the butterfly kiss gesture over and over. The hypnotizing display is worrisome, tragic, brilliant, and dystopian. It’s reminiscent of the digital footprints our loved ones leave behind once they depart the earthly plane, leaving behind only digital traces through old statuses, comments, videos, and photos, which we ritualistically view to aid us in our grief, as though they serve as a spiritual reunion. 

Suzie goes on to search for answers about Masa at his Christmas work party. With no recovered bodies, a ringing phone, and an inexplicable posthumous homebot gift, she needs to know what he’s really been doing at ImaTech all this time. She faces further evidence that her husband was a different man than the one she knew, learning from one of his drunk “employees” that he was intense and super intimidating. After some drunkenly inappropriate verbal stumbles, she wanders off and catches a glimpse of another homebot exiting a restricted section of the tech company. She catches the door just before it closes and inspects the lower levels known as Division Five. 

Behind a door marked “Sakamoto Incubator,” she discovers a row of diverse settings within rooms that are sealed behind glass walls, like an IKEA display. The various settings appear to be test environments for homebots, to observe how homebots perform in the home, medical facilities, and hospitality. The last test room curiously contains some live puppies which catch her eye enough to walk through the unlocked door. That unmistakable familiar yellow carpet populates the room – the same color carpet stained red with the blood of an unknown victim of the murderous rampage of #17. Suzie notices what looks like spattered blood on the carpet and an imprint from a homebot’s wheels leaving a trail of blood traveling across the room. She lets out, “What the f***, Masa?” as though pleading for an answer from the world.

The show brilliantly taps into this cognitive dissonance within Suzie’s psyche – her grappling with who she knew her husband to be and who she’s learning he supposedly was – with the use of dreamy faux flashbacks reminiscent of maladaptive daydreaming. When she develops a bad hunch about her husband, she envisions the worst in a hypothetical visual that may or may not have happened, but which nevertheless holds her mind hostage with its plausibility. Scenes where Masa introduces himself as a homicidal robot or commits murder catch us off guard, but remind us that Suzie’s memories of Masa are sometimes unreliable, fueled by a mix of nostalgia and paranoia.

Likewise, the show builds up plausible suspicion of Sunny’s doe-eyed, emotive, curiously jovial nature, waiting with baited breath to be vindicated of our distrust in the seemingly too good natured robot attempting to take the place of the family she just lost. The show is certainly another cautionary tale about an all too likely near technological future, but with the thoughtful trappings of a much more nuanced approach. Robots in Sunny are many things. Much like their human counterparts, they can be comforting, helpful, resourceful, funny, sassy, misguided, and morally compromised.  

These preconceptions are challenged by repeated moments of funny, heartwarming exchanges, genuine care, and naivete, but the suspicions aren’t without merit. Robots are products of their creators, after all, and not all creators are made equal, as we find out soon enough. This is foreshadowed by Masa when he first runs into Suzie at a silent restaurant. As she becomes frustrated with the vending machine that won’t take her money, he quips, “Don’t blame the machine.”

It’s also echoed through Sunny’s own attempts to make sense of her world and help Suzie uncover the mystery of who Masa was, what his involvement is with the Dark Manual (a hacking guide that enables you to break into homebots to manipulate their code), and what he has to do with a yakuza conspiracy. A subplot plays out within the yakuza family as the head boss falls ill. A chilling femme fatale, who leisurely gets her nails done as fellow yakuza torture a man in the other room, goes head to head with her cousin Jin, desperate to become her father’s successor.

Sunny’s first memories are of meeting Suzie, and she knows little of her creator until she becomes burdened with flashbacks akin to nightmares. She looks for reassurance that Suzie doesn’t think she’s capable of certain acts. Sometimes this is done humorously; at other times, it’s hair-raisingly creepy, especially when the notion that homebots can’t harm humans is challenged by Sunny’s actions at an underground robot fighting ring. 

Another layer of the homebot mystery is added when Suzie heads to the cocktail bar where she first met Masa to blow off some steam. There, she makes an unlikely friend in the mixologist aptly named Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy). Our fears of Sunny grow more palpable when Mixxy warns that the public wouldn’t be told if homebots were killing humans, and Suzie comes across a news article about a sudden uptick in “home accidents.” They aren’t to be trusted, she insists, which is why she always makes sure she turns hers all the way off, bypassing the less authoritative “sleep mode.” 

Mixxy wastes no time befriending Suzie, taking a curious investment in helping her solve this web of conspiracy, deceit, and betrayal involving Masa, homebots, and the yakuza crime family. She provides a refreshing perspective to counter Suzie’s excessive pessimism, but she can border on annoying at times. An amusing, playful rivalry unfurls between Mixxy and Sunny, with both being suspicious of each other, further confusing whose suspicions are more warranted.

Sunny Tackles Robo-Guilt, Conscience, and Morality 

Despite being a loyal bot, Sunny repeatedly demonstrates a concerning capacity to lie, deceive, and even use physical violence and neglect to achieve certain ends. She takes on the burden of a lost cause of a dying bird just to understand what it’s like to lose someone. These beautifully complex, humanizing scenes all build up to a genre-bending penultimate episode centered around a robo-existential crisis that blew me away. Sunny may be one of the best pieces of television to tackle the complexity of artificial intelligence in modern history. Its satirical ninth episode bears an incredible likeness to Mr. Robot’s experimental episodes spoofing ‘90s sitcoms. In Sunny, it utilizes a game show format to satirize questions about the nature of consciousness and free will. This episode is preceded by a moving backstory of Masa’s ImaTech origins involving a humble trash robot and a broken man finding his will to participate in society again. 

ImaTech’s homebots mimic human likeness, if not in appearance, then in personality, with their warm, affectionate tone, caring nature, and help around the house. They are tailor-made to adhere to your personal preferences and communication style. Suzie’s cynical, pessimistic worldview contrasted with Sunny’s childlike wonder and optimism is a comedy in itself, but its tone is never off-kilter. The irony is in human Suzie’s detached, aloof nature and propensity to isolate herself. It’s the well-meaning optimism of an empathetic robot that teaches her how to trust again, to be okay with being vulnerable. Sunny essentially heals her inner child.

Suzie’s irreverent personality may be her way of shutting people out, but it doesn’t work on Sunny, who starts responding in kind. This sardonic attitude rubs off on Sunny in such an inventive way that pays off in the series finale. Their communication style facilitates a bond between them, as unlike her mother-in-law or broader Japanese society, Sunny isn’t put off by Suzie’s pessimistic personality. This form of communication facilitates a bond between the two of them, signaling an increasingly close friendship built on trust and understanding. It’s something Sunny has to work for, so she wins over the affection not only of Suzie, but also of the viewer.

One major criticism that Sunny keeps receiving is that it is unsure of what it wants to say. On the contrary, I think Sunny has been crystal clear about its philosophy. It explores AI juxtaposed with human nature. Are we inherently good? Bad? Or are we just products of our creators? And can we transcend our programming to decide who we want to be for ourselves? These are the true questions that Sunny is preoccupied with. The machines are just a vehicle used to explore them. I don’t think Sunny is as concerned with whether or not robots can become sentient but whether we are meaningfully free in a way a preprogrammed homebot is not and if technology can in some ironic way help us get back in touch with our humanity.

What Sunny seems to be getting at in its exploration of AI is that it can be used as a force for good (to resocialize those recluses who have been left behind, to help people move past their grief, to alleviate the burden of domestic duties so they have more time to spend with their family) as well as evil (when programming goes wrong or is tampered with for malevolent purposes). In between, they can be utilized for all manner of things thanks to hackers who manipulate the homebots’ code to repurpose them into sexbots, robot fighting rings, and all other manner of seedy interests. 

Closing Thoughts

Sunny is certainly a thoughtful, cautionary tale about the abilities of AI and robots. The one consistent thread running through the behavior of the robots in the show is that they are "extensions of their creators," for better or worse. They’re not quite all good or all bad, leading to some brilliant introspective episodes about whether humans are meaningfully different from robots, and more importantly, if we can turn to robots for companionship when the human variety is out of reach. 

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