Are we on the verge of Hot TV Robot Summer? This week on HBO, Julio Torres’ delightfully, defiantly weird comedy Fantasmas is finishing up its first season, and one of the main characters is Bibo, a helpful yet pushy household robot whose secret desire is to become an actor. Now comes Apple TV’s Sunny , where the chipper but potentially troublesome robot is the title character, and core focus of the plot. One more, and it’s officially a trend! Adapted by Katie Robbins ( The Affair ) from Colin O’Sullivan’s book The Dark Manual , the series takes place in an alternate near-future version of Kyoto, where American expat Suzie ( Rashida Jones ) is grieving the deaths of her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and their young son in an airplane crash.
Stranded in a country where her grasp of the language is shaky at best, where the only person she knows well is her controlling mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg), Suzie’s life is further upended when she discovers that Masa was not, as he told her, a refrigerator designer, but the genius behind a new line of domestic robots. One of those, Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), is Masa’s posthumous gift to her, but also perhaps the key to unlocking the mystery of what he was doing with his life, and why his plane crashed. Sunny is at various points a mystery, a psychological drama, yet another sci-fi tale of the dangers of creating artificial life, and a buddy comedy, where one of the buddies just happens to have a glowing sc.
