Sunny Premiere Recap: Can a Robot Help Rashida Jones Learn to Love Again? Plus, Grade It!

In Apple TV+’s offbeat sci-fi dramedy Sunny , Rashida Jones plays a grieving woman who’s been drained of her will to live — but maybe a friendly robot can help her recharge.

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The Parks and Rec vet stars as Suzie, an American living in Kyoto, Japan and coping with the recent disappearance of her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and their son after a plane crash. When we meet Suzie, she’s in a daze of grief, answering questions about what her husband and son were wearing when they left for their flight. She’s not in the mood, though: “You have DNA. Isn’t that enough to figure out whose charred body is whose?” Suzie doesn’t have a robot at home, which is a rarity in this world, but she hates them, she says: “A robot killed my mother.” (It was a self-driving car, we learn.) Suzie’s husband Masa worked at a robotics company, but “he’s in refrigerators,” she insists.

Masa’s mother apologizes for her rudeness, but she’s not much help: She takes Suzie to a weird support group where a “handsome man” makes mourners cry and then delicately wipes away their tears. He has the mourners call their departed loved ones on the phone so they can hear their voice on their voicemail messages, but Suzie refuses: “I cried on the way over here. So I’m good.” The man keeps pressing her, though, so she relents and dials Masa’s number. Her call doesn’t go to voicemail, though; it just keeps ringing without connecting. Masa’s mother sees that as a good sign: Maybe there are survivors from the crash after all?

Suzie sinks deeper into depression, buying a bunch of snacks and heading home alone when she’s greeted by a man named Yuki Tanaka who works at Masa’s robotics company Imatech. He has a gift for Suzie: a chipper robot companion named Sunny. Suzie doesn’t want anything to do with it, but Tanaka tells her Masa built this robot himself to fulfill all of her emotional needs. (Ah, so he didn’t work in refrigerators after all.)

Suzie reluctantly keeps the robot, but she quickly shuts Sunny down by ordering her to go to sleep and stuffing her in a closet. Suzie then takes refuge in a kitchen cabinet, swigging wine straight from the bottle and calling Masa’s phone again — and spotting an invite to the Imatech holiday party. Later, while drinking more wine on the toilet, Suzie discovers she’s out of toilet paper, so she’s forced to shuffle with her pants around her ankles to get more… and she trips on her son’s toys, breaking her wine bottle. When Sunny tries to help clean up, Suzie snaps at her: “Don’t you touch his stuff!”

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Looking for answers, she heads to the Imatech holiday party and asks to talk to Tanaka. But she’s led instead to a much younger man also named Yuki Tanaka, who tells her how intense and intimidating Masa could be — which doesn’t match the Masa she knew at all. She wanders off and discovers a testing room downstairs with a bunch of puppies… and bloody tread marks on the floor. (Those match a flashback from the beginning where a robot went berserk and murdered people.) Suzie gives up and heads to a cocktail bar, where she befriends a bartender named Mixxy. Suzie and Masa used to come to this bar all the time, she tells Mixxy — and she also tells her that she and her husband just broke up. It takes 21 days to adapt to new things, Mixxy replies, and it’s only been a week since Masa disappeared.

Suzie’s never been in Japan without Masa, she admits, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She and Mixxy like the same song, though, which Mixxy calls a “red thread of destiny.” Mixxy just broke up with her girlfriend, too, so she has to resort to her robot for sexual gratification. Yep, she had someone help her hack into the bot’s circuitry and make it X-rated. She doesn’t trust her bot, though. A politician just died when a robot fell on top of him, she says — and she doesn’t think it was an accident. Suzie heads home (and is being tracked by a creepy guy with surveillance cameras) and decides to get rid of Sunny for good, hauling her out to a remote bridge. The robot is too heavy to lift, though, so she just leaves her there.

Before going to sleep, Suzie researches her husband’s corporate background — and that politician who died via robot. (In a photo, she spots more bloody tread marks.) When she wakes up, though, Sunny is back and waiting for her: “Merry Christmas! I made cookies!” A startled Suzie grabs something to smash the robot with, but she stops when she sees Sunny make the same hand gesture that Masa used to make to her, kissing her hands and then fluttering them like a bird’s wings. “Don’t you see, Suzie?” Sunny asks. “I was programmed for you.”

Are you plugged in for more episodes of Sunny after that premiere? Give it a grade in our poll, and then hit the comments to tell us if you’ll keep watching.

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