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. And that's part of what is so dangerous about AI is that there is something really captivating. It’s like a shiny new toy and that's part of what makes it so dangerous, how enticing it is.”
Making Sunny from scratch
Set in near-future Japan, the world of Sunny doesn’t look too different from what we know today. It’s partly the show’s way of making light of its emotional subject matter, to somewhat distract you from the ghost in the machine of Susie’s husband Masa Sakamoto (Hidetoshi Nishijima) by armchair travelling through the streets of Kyoto and Tokyo.
In this world, personal homebots like Sunny – which might look like SoftBank’s Pepper robot but was an animatronic puppet designed entirely from scratch for the show by the film production company Wētā Workshop in New Zealand (Robbins even worked with an anime designer to design some of its facial features) – are part of the everyday fray of society.
Sunny continues to grow and adapt to Susie's needs to become the perfect companion for her, which is a very enticing thing, but also a little bit dangerous...
Katie Robbins
Of course, Sunny is more special than your average robot – both in the show and the tech used to create her outside of it. “It took a whole village” to control Sunny, Robbins says, explaining that Joanna Soto Mora, who plays her, would wear a rig that was “basically a helmet with a camera in front of her and a screen” with Sunny’s face projected on it. Mora would then see Rashida Jones’ performance on the reverse side of the screen in front of her to allow for real-time reactions when filming. She likens it to Apple’s live Memojis that use motion capture to trigger the animation to mimic what you’re doing.
It’s small touches like these that make Sunny’s emotional effect on Susie even more believable, even though she’s still portrayed throughout as extremely skeptical of whether to trust the homebot made by her husband. In a way, Sunny is the surrogate avatar of Masa. “Sunny continues to grow and adapt to Susie's needs to become the perfect companion for her, which is – again – a very enticing thing, but also a little bit dangerous, because when things are so convenient, it does keep you from seeking out other experiences.”
Being at the precipice of AI
“AI – like all tech, like all art, like all things that are created by people – is a reflection back on us. It’s the mirror we hold up to ourselves. In that, there is so much potential to do good. That is why Sunny makes Susie laugh and smile. But it is also reflective of any technology that can get taken too far... There is a tremendous danger to overreach. But ultimately, the danger reflects back on us,” Robbins says.
AI – like all tech, like all art, like all things that are created by people – is a reflection back on us.
Katie Robbins
Sunny, like a lot of the best sci-fi movies and series, grapples with a lot of the big questions we’re facing today around AI largely because Robbins was working with a roboticist philosopher and engineer called Nell Watson at the time she was writing the show.
Watson was the one who gave Robbins a lot of the ideas for the emerging tech you see that has since become more of a reality, from the real-time translation powers that were added to the Samsung Galaxy Buds earlier this year to home robots like this one from LG that can identify your mood by facial recognition to try and cheer you up with, say, music (although, granted, it’s not quite as smart as seen in Sunny).
At the time that Robbins was being told about the emerging potentials of AI, she didn’t believe any of it could happen so soon. Of course, that’s now changed. But Robbins confides that it was still “terrifying” to suddenly realise it. News of learning language models like ChatGPT launching was being announced while she was filming in Japan, which made it seem like everything Watson had been predicting was coming true with generative AI on the scene. “I do think we are at the precipice of AI. It's not going anywhere. It's here, so we have to make these decisions and that's a little bit of what the show is grappling with: 'how are we going to use it in a way that is emblematic of what we all want for ourselves?'.”
At the time of writing, you can stream nine episodes of Sunny on Apple TV Plus before the season finale drops on September 4, 2024.
