In “Sunny,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+, Rashida Jones plays Suzie Sakamoto, an American living in a near-future Kyoto who has apparently lost her Japanese husband and 8-year-old son in the crash of a commercial airliner — although the possibility that things might be otherwise is raised early in the season. As in most mysteries, much is not as it seems. Grieving and refusing to publicly grieve, Suzie finds herself the unwilling recipient of Sunny (Joanna Sotomura) an Apple-white domestic robot whose adorable, Sanrio -style expressions display on a video screen.
This is, she’s told, supposed to make her feel less lonely. (“I’m a hugger,” says Sunny, much to Suzie’s horror. “Bring it in.
”) She has no actual friends. It’s at this point that Suzie learns that Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima, “Drive My Car” ), her husband, was not a refrigerator engineer, as she believed across their decade-long relationship, but was an important person in cutting-edge robotics; he had personally programmed Sunny for Suzie out of, I can only suppose, some prescient apprehension of his eventual absence. Nothing else makes sense, anyway.
(I’m going to call Sunny “she,” because the robot reads as female — in Colin O’Sullivan’s original novel, “The Dark Manual,” since re-titled to match the series, it’s called Sonny — and because all the other main characters, including the primary antagonist, are women. It’s their world we’re in, not accidentally.) H.
