It’s not always Sunny on Apple TV Plus
Mild spoilers follow for Sunny on Apple TV Plus.
At the heart of Sunny, one of the best Apple TV Plus shows with a 90% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, is an investigation into the relationship between humans and machines. The sci-fi show’s trailer makes it look like a buddy comedy about a homebot called Sunny and American expat Susie (Rashida Jones) uncovering the mysteries surrounding the death of her husband and son in Japan – and while that is the big riddle running throughout that keeps you guessing, there’s a lot more to this technological thriller than you might initially think.
Speaking to TechRadar, the show’s creator and executive producer Katie Robbins, revealed that she was personally drawn to exploring what comes after tragedy, which Colin O’Sullivan’s book that the show is based on The Dark Manual (the name of which has since been updated to be the same as the shows) also does.
But Sunny is quite different from the novel, « both tonally and where the story goes », she explains, as it focuses on also exploring how AI – in the form of grief tech – makes us closer, while also keeping us apart. When Robbins was writing the plot, she drew inspiration from researching a field of robotics called human robot interaction, which looks at the ways robots can be emotional surrogates for people. It’s what led her down the path of discovering both the positive potential, and peril, of AI.
“That’s one of the big questions that the show is grappling with, that there’s a positive potential to so much technology. But like all things that are created by humans, there is the potential for it to be misused or overused and so there are two sides of the same coin, [just] like Sunny. As a character in the show, [Sunny] is really representative of this dilemma.”
In the eighth episode of the show – ‘Trash or Not-Trash’ – that was released on August 21, “Sunny is so sweet and funny and the answer to all of Susie’s problems and in the next scene, she is terrifying and demonic and murderous.
