Congrats to Sunny star and executive producer Rashida Jones for convincing Apple and A24 to take her on an expenses-paid Japanese vacation. Too bad what the Parks and Recreation star brought home to show for it is a stylish slog of a sci-fi thriller, 10 plodding episodes that squander an intriguing premise on someone who successfully dares you not to care about her.
In this adaptation of Colin O’Sullivan’s novel The Dark Manual, Jones plays Suzie Sakamoto, a Kyoto-based expat who’s just learned that her husband Masa (Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen (Fares Belkheir) have died in a mysterious plane crash. Or did they? It all seems interesting from the outset: Suzie is an ordinary person thrown into an extraordinary circumstance, whose tragedy could actually be part of a conspiracy. She starts developing doubts, especially when she calls Masa’s phone and, instead of going straight to voicemail, it keeps on ringing.
Even more eyebrow-raising is what Masa has left behind. As if in anticipation of the loss, he’s bought his wife a gift: Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), an adorable, chipper android known as a homebot. Sunny has been programmed to be an ideal companion for Suzie, with a full range of human emotions and even the ability to mimic some of Masa’s own gestures. But Sunny’s friendliness and familiarity make her an uncomfortable annoyance to the antisocial Suzie – until she conveniently realizes that Sunny could be the key to learning the truth behind not just Masa and Zen’s disappearance, but the rest of her husband’s cascading secrets.
Add a mod-futuristic Kyoto where non-Japanese speakers like Suzie can wear earpieces to communicate with locals and people deal programming code like drugs, and Sunny seems primed to offer the same kind of mundane-meets-sci-if delight as Severance. Instead, what should be a propulsive thriller with a slick flair, great setting, and odd couple leads ends up spinning its wheels. The mystery of what happened to Suzie’s husband and son becomes increasingly convoluted with each reveal of a new shadowy figure from Masa’s past. Worse, none is ever interesting enough to justify the amount of time it takes to answer any of the questions Sunny is asking. A large part of the blame for that slowdown falls on an overreliance on flashbacks, to both establish Suzie and Masa’s relationship and fill the audience in on what happened to Masa before Suzie figures it out herself. We’re always picking up important clues far in advance of Suzie, which makes it hard to stay engaged with her quest to uncover the same information. Adding insult to injury, Sunny keeps its protagonist in the dark for as long as possible.
Yet Suzie herself is just as much at fault for Sunny’s diminishing returns. While her journey is inherently emotional – a grieving mother and wife is forced to open herself up to others in order to unpack a massive tragedy – Suzie is anything but. You can’t really blame it on Jones: She’s given little to work with as Suzie, who never evolves from the pissed-off, bird-flipping, misanthropic misfit we meet at the start. As drily funny as the show and its main character can be, it’s hard to become emotionally invested in an abrasive character unwilling to change. Sunny’s success is dependent on us caring about Suzie, her family, and the danger that surrounds them both. However, Suzie seems hellbent on making us do anything but.
The cast of characters around her is small, yet more colorful. Suzie and Sunny are joined by blue-haired barista Mixxy (singer-songwriter annie the clumsy), who commits to the challenge of breaking Suzie out of her shell. You (of Terrace House fame) is great as the sinister Hime, although she suffers from being part of Sunny’s weakest storyline, involving Masa’s dealings with the Yakuza. And there’s some fun to be had with Suzie’s push-and-pull with her suspicious mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg). But they’re also hamstrung by Sunny’s sluggish pacing, as the characters reveal themselves painfully slowly. Mixxy and Suzie’s relationship is still frustratingly uneven by the end, and Noriko’s presence is increasingly limited for eye-rolling reasons.
Sunny is also a bright spot, a robot with more depth than the humans around her; her effort to win Suzie’s affection and understand her own purpose is legitimately moving. She’s also emblematic of the show’s failure to become a captivating piece of science fiction: An 11th-hour attempt to beef up Sunny’s backstory, and actually make use of the quirky stylishness teased through the lightly futuristic production design, comes way too late, hinting at a more daring, even experimental take on O’Sullivan’s novel that never came to be.
