🟧 Apple TV’s Sunny has world-building problems
Near-future Kyoto is nowhere in particular.
[Minor spoilers throughout.]
Nate Gallant: I’m not yet sure if you should watch Apple TV’s noir-ish, near-future sci-fi show Sunny (new episodes airing Wednesdays through the first week of September), but I am committed to the bit of a general halfway-point review, mostly because I think the show has plotted itself into a very specific corner. So I’ll try to think a bit here about how, before it attempts to leap out.
Sunny’s first season began very promisingly. Rashida Jones plays Suzie Sakamoto, a requisitely fashionable American lost and grieving in some mid-century modern fantasy of a house in Kyoto. She’s been left with a few bizarre clues to unravel what appears to be a grave conspiracy at the tech company where her long-time husband, now deceased in a suspicious plane crash that also took her son, worked on secret robotics projects — despite telling her that he was in the company’s refrigerator department. She is soon joined by a zealously friendly and quick-learning “homebot”, a softly glowing robotic companion left for her by a mysterious man at the apparent behest of her husband. However “Sunny,” the surreptitiously gifted homebot, seems to have an advanced functionality that is out of place even in this ambiguous future of Japan populated by nearly ubiquitous domestic automatons, which hints at Suzie’s husband having been involved in an unsavory underground world of illicit robot modification.
Halfway through the season, however, I’m less convinced the show knows what it is after. The plot feels like it’s playing out a pitch essentially based on that Phoebe Bridgers song, “Kyoto”: a general smattering of sad foreigner feels in Japan, set on the low heat of some heterosexual drama with a side-serving of queerness. This is admittedly a bit reductive, but of late would not be out of place. We’re in a moment of renewed interest in specifically Anglo-ish-mediated media set in Japan: James Clavell’s Shogun, Brad Pitt’s great white Bullet Train. Sunny was based on a 2018 novel about an Irish woman also lost in Japan, The Dark Manual. I am not sure if the book is any better, but it seems like someone just said “A24 but in Japan” (in fact, this is an early foray for A24 into producing prestige TV) and an executive at Apple just exploded or went into a fugue state and started decorating their future second home.
The show has, since a very promising start, confusingly stripped away all of Jones’ likeability or relatability, piece by piece. Practically every scene is punctuated only with her yelling “fuck” or “shit” or flipping someone off or being more and more cruel to everyone helping mediate between her and a language she can’t speak after a decade in the country. She’s been tagged as culturally Jewish, for some reason, but she can’t seem to get her mouth around the Yiddish, either. This monoculturalism screams through her reliance on an inter-culturally fluent new friend and sometimes flirty companion, Mixxy, to whom she is increasingly cruel and demanding, to the point of making me wish Mixxy would just ditch Suzie.
The big-picture connections between the edges of this dystopian society and her personal tragedy are oddly abandoned for some very under-developed yakuza power struggles, which don’t feel specific to the plot or the vast available archive of existing yakuza tropes. They rather serve as a generic plot line of nefariousness which neatly wraps up the entire underworld of robot hacking, nullifying one of the more interesting mysteries from the start. Suzie’s mother in law, a big player in her personal drama, is impossibly cruel, but in a way reminiscent of a mid-2010’s Adam McKay movie, straining credulity without any of the schmaltzy punchlines. Perhaps the second half of the season will reveal why she, too, feels so out of place.
Another core issue is the whole premise of Suzie’s inability to grasp Japan, which is set up to frame her passage through a psychodrama about human vs. robotic companionship and digitally mediated isolation. It makes less and less sense the more her surroundings are presented as empty Japanese dress for very broad, very Hollywood-feeling characters. This isn’t helped by the show’s lazy world-building. The fact they are in Japan or a future dystopia are leaned on only when convenient, and the season has structurally ended up having very little to do with either Japan or this future, at least thus far. Most troubling, the plot by necessity often implies that Suzie can’t connect there because Japanese people are cultural automatons, contrasting with her very frustrated, bougie North American affect in a world to which she’s made zero cultural concession. Thus, without any depth from surrounding characters, the whole sense of stakes falls squarely on Rashida Jones’s increasingly siloed performance of human drama. This is a big ask given her sharp anti-hero-ish turn, largely born out of her screaming obscenities into a half-understanding void, which has the appearance of being Kyoto, but mostly feels like a movie-set.
If I were to offer a tentative theory, the show’s failure to amount to more than the sum of its disconnected parts so far feels like, at its core, a very particular failure in translation, or maybe even an overcorrection from what could be lost in translation (yes). The problem is the primary deus ex machine of a plot device, the robot, a selectively omniscient smart-device used by everyone in this world, which can instantly and perfectly translate for Suzie and do whatever else the plot requires, and also just happens to mimic the aesthetic of the first-gen, colorful iMac desktops. These weird devices hide any difficult mechanisms of intercultural exchange, any potential for misunderstanding, despite the fact that Suzie’s whole character arc is built on her apparent inability to navigate Japan. Every conversation feels overly scripted, robotic, but in a mechanical way. There’s an odd doubling effect with the show’s subtitles, given the in-narrative automatic translation, which further smooths over any presentation of foreignness.
Maybe there’s a comment in there somewhere about the need for human connection over and above pure, utilitarian communication, or the xenophobia that Japan can martial against anyone to accede to very high demands of assimilation. But at the level of what we see and hear, the ghost in the machine neither alienates us from or makes us yearn for a human voice. Sunny always hits the same off-putting tune, slightly off-center of uncanny. There’s likely a big twist coming. Maybe Suzie is a robot, or all the Japanese people are robots? They do all seem to be acting in a slightly different TV show than Rashida Jones, sort of the reverse of David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Perhaps this would make all the artifice and stilted dialogue come to feel part of the plotting, in retrospect. Thus far, however, I’m doubtful, but not without hope, that the show can land jumping what I imagine will be a very, very big shark.
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