Sunny, Sleep!

I've watched Parks and Recreation almost twice. The first time I made it all the way through, the second I only got about two thirds of the way in, at which point I stopped, having decided it was a lot more annoying and the characters a lot less likeable than I remembered. 

On neither run did I pay an enormous amount of attention to Rashida Jones' character, Ann Perkins. She mostly seemed to be there as a foil for Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope and, latterly, as a vehicle for making certain socio-political points, something the show leaned into heavily and occasionally awkwardly. I hadn't really noticed that on my original watch, thanks to it also being extremely funny.

Even so, I remembered the actor's name well enough and sufficiently positively that, when I saw she was the lead in a Sci-Fi show called Sunny on AppleTV+, it was enough to make me consider watching it. I was in the market for a good sitcom. I'd just run out of Ted Lassos. 

Not that Sunny was ever going to be a direct replacement. On the face of it, the shows are in no way alike. One is a sports-based sitcom in a contemporary British setting, the other a science-fictional black comedy set in near-future Japan. They do have two things in common, though; they both have episodes that generally run for around half an hour (In the case of Ted Lasso, for the first season, anyway...) and they each feature a central character who's living and working in a country not their own, whose ways and mores they do not entirely grasp.

Of those two factors, it was the episode length that initially attracted me. I had a half-hour slot to fill and it was a good fit. And I wanted something that was going to stick to the brief. I was slightly irked by the way the episodes of Ted Lasso stretched and sprawled over the later seasons. Not that I thought the episodes were baggy or that they outstayed their welcome. It's just that when I start watching a half-hour sitcom series I would kind of like it to stay that way. It messes with my timings if it doesn't.

The other reason I picked it was the premise. (Apart from there not being exactly a wealth of other options. I do seem to have run through most of the half-hour sitcoms worth bothering with now.) Here's the pitch as made by someone in Apple's PR Dept:

 "Rashida Jones stars as a woman in Kyoto investigating her family’s disappearance with the help of a robot named Sunny." 

That's short and to the point, isn't it? There's a lot in there, though. 

First up, there's the name of the star. I've already said that that was a hook for me. Then there's the name of the city. Kyoto is intriguing. Japan is one of those countries that's been cool for decades now. Anything set there is going to have an innate appeal, even for me, though I'm not much of a Japanophile. But it's usually Tokyo, isn't it? Just like it's usually London or New York. Kyoto's a nice switch.

The show is also a mystery, as we learn from a few words in the middle of that single sentence. That's good. I like mysteries and investigations thereof. 

But the capper comes right at the end. There's a robot. And the robot, not Rashida Jones, is the title character. 

It's an exemplary piece of promotion. So much packed into as single sentence. It pulls you right in. Well, it did me.

Of course, the first thing I did before deciding whether I was going to go any further with it was to check how many episodes there were and how many seasons it ran or even if it was still running. That's standard procedure before starting any new series on a streaming platform these days. Don't want to get sucked into something that's going to come to a sudden stop after the first season, when the show doesn't get renewed.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened to Sunny. Ten episodes and gone. Which would be fine if it was a mini-series with a finite arc but it wasn't. It was supposed to carry on. It just didn't.

Why? Not because it was poorly received by the critics, that's for sure. Sunny has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn't do so well on Metacritic, where it just fails to make 70%, but even there both the critics and the viewers are of a "Generally Favorable" opinion. 

No, apparently what happened was that no-one watched it. It seems Rashida Jones' name can't open a TV show after all. Or maybe Apple didn't promote it vigorously enough, despite being able to write a killer one-liner for that exact purpose.

A few years ago, the knowledge that the show got canned after one season would have been enough to make me move on to look for something that lasted longer. That was before premature cancellation became the norm for most good shows. I decided a while back that to skip something just because the schedulers went cold on it at the first opportunity would be to deny myself some potentially good viewing, so these days I'm willing to watch anything that looks like it might be worthwhile, even when I know it's not going anywhere.

Before making the final decision, I watched the trailer. I almost always watch the trailer before deciding whether to watch a new show about which I know nothing. Trailers rarely tell you if you're going to enjoy something but they're not bad at letting you know you won't. If the acting or the script is unbearable in a two-minute trailer it's a fair bet it won't get any less so when there's more of it.

That's the trailer I watched. I hope you'll agree that it doesn't really scream "comedy". In fact, neither does that single sentence description I was so impressed by, now I come to think of it. It may well be that the only reasons I thought it was going to be a comedy were the length (There aren't many half-hour dramas.) and because I'd looked it up on Wikipedia, where it's described as a "black comedy".

All of which is a long preamble to say how I came to watch it in the first place. The real question is was it any good?

Better do the Spoiler Alert thing now...

Yes, it was good. Very good. Verging on excellent. 

Rashida Jones is much better in this than in Parks&Rec. Well, I thought she was. She has to make a depressed, miserable, grief-stricken character appealing, sympathetic and funny, which is an ask but she manages it. 

As always in these situations, no-one who's just experienced a truly traumatic, catastrophic event in their personal lives can behave realistically because if they did no-one would watch but both Rashida Jones character, Suzie, and her mother-in-law, Noriko (Played by Judy Ongg.) do a great job of conveying the depth of emotion they're experiencing, following the deaths in a plane crash of their respective husband and son/son and grandson, all their emotions and reactions being convincingly displayed through the filters of their different cultural backgrounds and expectations.

This isn't entirely a fish-out-of-water comedy like Ted Lasso because Suzie has been in Japan for long enough to get married and have a son, who appears to be about six or seven years old. She's lived and worked in Japan for at least that long, so she's no longer new to the culture. She just isn't really part of it. Nor, it appears, does she want to be. 

She hasn't even tried to learn the language, something which comes up several times as an indicator of how unwilling she is to integrate, although that interpretation is undermined to a degree by the fact that everyone uses a little in-ear device that fluently translates speech from one language to another. Once those become commonplace in the real world, I'm not sure how many people are going to bother learning another language any more.

That's one of the few indicators that we're sometime in the future. Other than that and the widespread presence of robots, there really isn't much to suggest this isn't a contemporary story. And realistically, it doesn't need to be more than a few years ahead of where we are now. The homebots look, if anything, somewhat behind the kind of technology that already exists, at least physically. Where they deviate is in the degree of self-awareness and genuine intelligence they display.

Which brings me to Sunny herself. Having watched the show, I don't think many people would say "itself". Mostly that's because Sunny is voiced by a human being, Joanna Sotamura. There's absolutely none of that "robot voice" nonsense. Sunny talks like a person. 

There's another major factor in accepting Sunny as a person herself, though, and that's her face. If engineers in robotics labs aren't taking notes and making prototypes based on the way it's done in the show, they should be. 

Sunny doesn't have a human face. She has a giant emoji. Her face is just a big, round, glowing screen on which very simple eyes, eyebrows and mouth can be displayed. With those few features she can express just about any emotion you care to name - happiness, amusement, sadness, anger, fear, curiosity, suspicion, even sarcasm and irony. It's astonishingly versatile, utterly convincing and I would imagine entirely technically possible with today's technology. 

What's perhaps less feasible is the way Sunny thinks. She clearly does think. She's also evidently self-aware. That's perhaps where it's most apparent we're in the future. A live link to an LLM would give you a good approximation of self-awareness but it would be a trick. This is the real thing.

And that's why Suzie, starting from a position of loathing close to hatred, comes to see Sunny as a friend. A good, close friend. Perhaps someone she loves. The show is indeed a mystery and a good one but the redemption arc has as much to do with Suzie coming to know herself through her relationship with Sunny as it does with finding out what really happened to he husband and son. 

As for the plot, it's relatively easy to follow even though, as always with these things, it's also ferociously complicated. It revolves around what happened to Masa, Suzies's husband, who always led her to believe he worked in refrigerator software. It turns out he was in robotics. I'm not entirely sure even now why he kept it a secret but it was probably something to do with the Yakuza, who are at the back of most of the bad stuff that happens in the story.

And there's a lot of bad stuff. The show was made by A24, a studio not known for holding back, and I found Sunny a tough watch at times, at least for a supposed comedy. There are several torture scenes and although the camera always cuts away long before anything terrible happens, there's enough for anyone with an active imagination to want to look away even sooner. There are also a couple of sudden explosions of violence that seemed slightly out of keeping with the rest of the show.

Mostly, though, it's people talking and walking and drinking. There's a lot of running away, too. One whole episode is dedicated to it. There's quite a lot of general milling about about in the streets of Kyoto, which gives ample opportunity for those neon-lit night shots so beloved of fans of Japanese pop culture. Also plenty of scenes in booths, stores, offices and temples to keep the cultural drip-feed pumping.

All of which I enjoyed. You expect it, don't you? Like you expect a lot of cars going down hills in shows set in San Francisco or street cafes in anything set in Paris. 

The reason everyone's after Suzie is because Suzie has Sunny and the reason everyone's after Sunny is because Sunny can hurt people. Homebots shouldn't be able to do that. Like Asimov's robots, homebots cannot harm a human although they can cut each other up with chainsaws well enough in back-street knock-offs of Robot Wars, which I don't think was something Asimov ever considered.  

Masa has spent his adult life teaching robots how to be more than just robots and it seems one of the side-effects of his breakthroughs in the field was to make them so attached to individual humans they'd break their programming to protect them. This is very well established by some quite detailed backstory and does make sense when, as I said earlier, you begin to see the robots as self-aware individuals. Your dog might attack someone to protect you, after all, no matter how friendly and well-behaved it was otherwise. 

The Yakuza want the code so they can get bots so assassinate people without the suspicion falling on them. The whole thing is complicated even further by an internal power struggle within a particular Yakuza family. Let's be honest, this show is packed with plot. I've seen movies with less than there is a single episode of this thing.

It all hangs together remarkably well. I never felt lost or thought things were going off the rails. It's complex in a good way. As are the characters, several of whom I haven't even mentioned. 

I'm not going to go through them all but I really have to say something about Mixxy. She's an "aspiring mixologist" who Suzie meets in a bar and ends up spending most of the rest of the show with. Mixxy is played by annie the clumsy. That is the actress's name, something I didn't know until about two minutes ago. If you're surprised, imagine how I feel...

annie the clumsy is "a singer and songwriter from Japan. Inspired by New Zealand-based comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, she has been making songs with her lovely ukulele, very clumsily, since 2011.
She produces her own Youtube show called the annie the clumsy show where she does random stuff very randomly." In Sunny she does not play the ukelele. Not even once. She's not even that random.

What she is is extremely watchable. She and Rashida Jones make a great double act. Mixxy is very funny and very endearing and I did not trust her for one single second from the first moment she appeared. 

She tells Suzie right at the start that she's a lesbian and she's just broken up with her girlfriend so I thought at first she had designs on her but a couple of very brief plot moments later on made it quite plain she had a very different agenda. Sunny absolutely does not trust Mixxy and Sunny is one hundred per cent right.

Except, by the end of the season, Sunny does come to trust Mixxy because Mixxy is just like a puppy. You couldn't not like her even though she is all kinds of trouble. 

All of which leads directly into the cliffhanger at the very, very end of the last show. The cliffhanger that perfectly sets up the second series, which will never come.

If you watch the show, which I strongly recommend you do, and you're uncomfortable with hanging plot threads and unresolved endings, I suggest you switch off about ninety seconds before the end of that last episode. At that point, everything is there or thereabouts resolved and happily, too. It's still a bit of an open-ended finish but it feels like a slice-of-life story where everyone carries on with their lives and we go our own way and leave them to it.

If you stay right til the end, though, you'll find out you were absolutely right about Mixxy. I believe my exact words were "I bloody knew it!" Sadly, I'll never know what happens next although logic tells me it would have been something bad followed by something worse followed by something good, which is how these things always go.

The show is based, very loosely I'd imagine, on a novel called The Dark Manual by Colin O'Sullivan. I've added it to my wishlist so with any luck someone might give it to me for Christmas. If they don't, I'll buy it myself. 

It might be the only way to find out what happened next.