SUNNY – Season One

Grief is no easy process to depict in art. Showing a character undergoing mourning over a lengthy period is, in many cases, prone to becoming self-indulgent, overly sentimental, or just plain bitter. Sunny doesn’t exactly fall into any of these traps, though it’s not without its issues in this regard. Following Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman living in Japan whose husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen (Fares Belkheir) vanished in a plane crash, the series’ representation of this protagonist’s sorrow is mostly bland.

The character has a predictable routine: drinking alcohol straight from the bottle to self-medicate, getting easily irritated with her ‘homebot’ Sunny (Joanna Sotomura), occasionally spiralling due to a specific memory or item connected to her husband or son (almost always the former), and swearing. When the show briefly ventures outside of this monotonous territory, there are rare emotive scenes where Suzie reckons with the hole that’s been left in her family and identity, but these sentimental moments aren’t nearly as heart-breaking as the show insists on.

While Sunny isn’t as maudlin as Ricky Gervais’ take on a similar subject in his series Afterlife (2019-2022), in some ways it is worse for being so generic. Aside from a noticeable uptick in quality very late in its first season, the show offers little in the way of emotional resonance or unexpected moments. Its plot is often outlandish, but even that becomes predictable, where it’s constantly searching for wacky antics or zany misadventures that just aren’t present. As our conduit for this world, Suzie, though easy to pity at first, gradually becomes aggravating due to how consistently irritable she is, with this quickly turning into her defining trait.

Although Suzie’s predictable patterns of behaviour never dig up any illuminating insights on mourning, she is still very fleshed out compared to some of the show’s side characters. At first, she is an explosion of personality in contrast to Sunny, a friendly-looking robot that is given to her by one of her husband’s colleagues, who explains that it was Masa’s wish for her to have it. Sunny has been configured to specifically cater to Suzie’s needs, starting off as a blank slate without a discernible personality. Although no satisfaction can be derived from this protagonist’s constant frustrations with her helpful homebot, Sunny has no characteristics outside of a grating adherence to niceness and positivity.

While this makes for a fitting contrast with a character who gets drunk by mid-morning to alleviate her profound sorrow, as with Suzie’s grief, nothing urgent or resonant is being explored here. Ultimately, it’s better to think of the disappearance of Suzie’s husband and son as a backdrop for the narrative rather than an insight into this character’s (or the show’s) emotional palette. As a way of kickstarting this story, it is quite effective, setting up some intrigue with Masa and the secrets he withheld from his family. 

Since his disappearance, Suzie has been gradually learning that he isn’t the same person that he presented himself as in his interactions with her and Zen, which causes Suzie to recontextualize some of her memories with him. Since the viewer doesn’t know Masa, and only has a window into his existence through Suzie and the context that he is presumed dead, these developments aren’t gripping, but they suggest some interesting new ground for the story to cover. Unfortunately, much of that is squandered with a very generic portrayal of the yakuza, the series’ villains and a group that has already had more than enough representation across various media.

As someone with very little understanding of Japanese culture, I can only assume that the works of art depicting this criminal organisation time and time again are overstating the group’s importance in the nation. The main issue here, though, is that almost everyone feels they understand the yakuza after countless works of art have already depicted them, so it would take real insight into their inner workings to make such characters feel like they’re not cardboard cut-outs that could be found in just about any other project. The villainous yakuza members in Sunny are depicted even more blandly than Suzie’s grief, with gleefully sadistic characters that are much more annoying than they are frightening.

The prime example of this is Himé (You), a high-ranking yakuza member whose high-pitched, childlike voice is contrasted with her innate brutality. This is made clear in a scene when she is conversing casually with someone doing her nails, all while the terrified worker is trying not to focus on the horrific sounds of a man being tortured in the other room. The only problem is that such a contrast doesn’t showcase anything interesting about the character, though it says a lot about the writers’ desperation to insist on how scary and foreboding she is.

Her immature behaviour and mocking one-liners towards characters in despair become tiresome very quickly. This is the kind of shallow characterisation that would work far better in a young adult novel or an animated series than a live-action show, particularly one geared at adults, though the same could be said of almost the entirety of Sunny‘s humour and tension. The violence and frequent swearing make this a very poor choice for children to watch, but there are times when one could easily be fooled into thinking that they make up the show’s target audience. Although the series shows maturity in taking Suzie’s grieving seriously, with quite a poignant moment at the close of the pilot episode where she gets Sunny to continually replicate a gesture her husband made to her just before his disappearance, its humour is about as childish as Himé’s affectations.

Many of Sunny’s side characters also seem suited to a sitcom format. Noriko (Judy), Suzie’s mother-in-law, is a typical motherly archetype who is obsessed with order above all else, even when her life is beginning to fray. Unlike the crass and unapproachable Suzie, Noriko tries to mask her grief around others. This could be interesting, but it often leads to some very banal conversations with the character, who is so wooden in her behaviour that she doesn’t feel like a real person.

Suzie’s new friend Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy), an aspiring mixologist who strikes up a conversation with the protagonist at a bar Suzie and Masa frequented, is a bizarre creation. Despite the many jokes the character utters, the only funny thing about her is that an aspiring mixologist goes by the name of Mixxy. She’s an incredibly awkward character, though I’m not sure if that’s intentional. Her positive demeanour is insincere and she is often dismissed as the stereotypical side character in the story.

She exists to provide some light-hearted humour in otherwise serious moments, or to offer words of advice or criticism towards Suzie that will make our protagonist re-evaluate herself and her circumstances. Although this technically means that she serves a purpose in the series, Mixxy is so strangely half-formed that she also feels like she belongs in a show aimed at children.

Even the thriller elements of Sunny seem geared towards a young audience, with a very flimsy mystery plot that, even in its darkest moments, comes across as a more violent and expletive-laced version of the kind of story an adult would make up on the fly as a bedtime tale for their child. Sunny has a very improvised feel that makes it difficult to buy into its sense of importance. While the constant switching between tones and genres ensures its central mystery is impossible to decipher, which does make it mildly intriguing, the absence of cohesiveness means that viewers aren’t allowed to settle into this narrative.

This wouldn’t be much of an issue if the series didn’t feel so plodding at points. Without spoiling anything important, in the fifth episode Suzie, Sunny and Mixxy get lost in the woods. One major aspect of the plot is as follows: Sunny rescues a dying baby bird, which irritates Suzie to no end for whatever reason, with Mixxy implying to Sunny that she should nurse it (though she later denies that she said anything of the sort). Halfway through the first season of a comedy-drama about a woman coming to terms with the disappearance of her husband and son, as well as with her husband seemingly being involved with the yakuza, the stakes shouldn’t be this depressingly low.

While the humour falls surprisingly flat in this series, Sunny’s ninth episode finds an effective way to craft an absurd yet engaging story through an extended dream sequence. Resembling a Japanese game show, the outlandishness and overt theatricality here feels unnerving, while also being portrayed well enough to come across as a sincere homage to such bombastic television. This is also where Sunny finally feels like a fully fleshed-out character. In many ways she is the series’ shining light, starting blandly and gradually developing likes and dislikes, as well as a clear personality and dramatic arc.

It’s only in reflecting on the series that it becomes clear how well her character development is integrated into the plot. This episode also offers some worthwhile moral dilemmas to grapple with, which was sorely needed in the rest of the series since it features AI so prominently.

Sunny is at its best when it develops its robot characters, as they feel like real people once they are given room for adequate characterisation. While Rashida Jones is likely to earn the most acclaim of the series’ actors, it is Joanna Sotomura, the voice of Sunny, who easily shows the most range of the series’ cast members. Given the fact that this is a role that relies entirely on her vocal performance, and which she would have voiced in a recording studio away from the series’ sets, it’s a huge achievement that she was able to pull off all of Sunny’s facets. Not only is this character layered, but Sotomura effortlessly portrays her evolving humanity and self-awareness after starting off as a cookie-cutter, people-pleasing bot, a change that could only have been realised with an excellent voice actor at the helm.

Although Sunny’s finale finally succeeds with some of its comedic moments, it can’t resist showing how easily irritated and aggravating Suzie is, even if it makes so little sense in the story that one has to wonder if the character has any instinct for self-preservation. Since the show is never able to convincingly shed light on the trauma of loss, or the more unique trauma of not knowing if your loved ones are alive or dead, nothing is keeping this central mystery about the condition of Suzie’s husband and son interesting. Frankly, it lost steam long before this point.

When it comes to Sunny’s technical elements, most of them aren’t worthy of praise or criticism. They blend in well enough alongside the story that there’s nothing remarkable about them, which isn’t a bad thing in a tale of this kind. In terms of high points, the models for the robots are well-executed, and the series’ use of listening devices that translate speech in foreign languages in real-time is a very impressive near-future concept, especially given how vital it is in a story set in Japan with a protagonist who doesn’t fluently speak the language.

As for the series’ representation of Japan, that’s more muddled. Suzie hasn’t made much of an effort to assimilate into Japanese society, with the most glaring example of this being her failure to fully learn the language even as she’s raising her son in Japan. When she is asked about her reasoning for moving here to start a new life, it’s clear that her answer partly being comprised of her love of the manga/anime Sailor Moon is designed to inspire disdain.

But if Sunny wants to portray a nuanced depiction of Japan and the experiences of being a foreigner within it, perhaps the most generic possible yakuza plotline could have been excised from the story, or at least reinvented in some way to make it feel less formulaic. The bland conversations about double-crossing and ascendancy in the criminal organisation are meaningless when they revolve around two-bit side characters that have no interesting qualities. Beyond this, the series feels as if it exists in a kind of dream world that an immigrant like Suzie would have envisioned of Japan, since every other character revolves around her, and the thriller elements are frothy and meandering, as if they’re making an appearance in a comic book series for young children (minus the bloodshed and swearing).

Though Sunny makes an effort to touch on the issue of hikikomori, a form of severe social withdrawal that affects hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, its inability to offer more insight into the lives of everyday Japanese people stops it from feeling very insightful on this topic. It doesn’t effectively align this widespread social problem with Suzie’s struggles, not just because of the obvious disconnect between this protagonist and Japanese society, but also because Suzie and her needs dominate the series. Despite an intriguing penultimate episode and a strong character arc from one of the series’ key players, Sunny isn’t a compelling, insightful watch, and I’m doubtful that future seasons could rectify its blandness.

USA | 2024 | 10 EPISODES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writers: Katie Robbins, Nancy Won, Kimi Howl Lee, Julissa Castillo, Aja Gabel, Ken Kobayashi, Sarah Sutherland & Yugo Nakamura.
directors: Lucy Tcherniak, Dearbhla Walsh, Colin Bucksey & Makoto Nagahusa.
starring: Rashida Jones, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Joanna Sotomura, Judy Ongg, Annie the Clumsy, Jun Kunimura & You.