Things came to a head on “Sunny” July 31 with an actual bear attack. How do you ward off a bear? For AI home assistant Sunny (voiced by Joana Sotomura), bartender Mixxy (annie the clumsy), and Suzie (Rashida Jones), it’s a matter of going big more than making themselves big.
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And how do you go big? For Sunny and for “Sunny,” it boils down to Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”
The trio finds themselves cornered by a very angry bear during a misbegotten escape to the countryside — turns out there are some things as scary as the yakuza — at which point Mixxy and Suzie begin to scream-sing the classic 1974 song to frighten away the bear. It works (though that says more about the performance than the tune), and they’re saved. But getting the rights to this particular track is always a fraught experience.
For instance, Parton initially denied the use of the song (which Whitney Houston made a worldwide hit) in the final episode of “Pam & Tommy.” As the Hulu series’ music supervisor Amanda Thomas told IndieWire, “She’s open for the right things. We went back and we recontextualized the whole thing. And we’re like, ‘Here’s the story we’re trying to tell. We are telling this narrative from Pamela’s perspective, as someone who got the short end of the stick and was not done well by the men in her life.’ [Pamela’s] in a place where she can look back fondly on this time in her life, and Tommy being a part of that time, but from a point of view that she’s moved on from it and she’s grown from it. The song really speaks to that in a cool way. When it was initially denied and I told the team, I was like, ‘We’re going back for it.’ And then when it cleared Rob [Siegel, showrunner] was texting me like, ‘I heard Dolly cleared?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, she approved.’ And he was like, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much. That song is probably the most important song.'”
“Sunny” showrunner Katie Robbins also knew that she wanted “I Will Always Love You” to be the song that strengthens the bond between Suzie and Mixxy. “It was hard, yes,” she told IndieWire. “And there were many a letter written to Dolly professing my undying love and that I will always love her.”
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At the end of the episode, Mixxy and Suzie have trauma-bonded, and though the lyrics may not seem all that applicable to their relationship (“Goodbye, please don’t cry / We both know that I’m not what you need”), the act of banding together has made them into real friends.
Things weren’t quite as smooth for Robbins, who found her great love for Parton and the song took a hit due to the perils of post-production. “I will say that like when we were in the process of editing that scene,” she said, “hearing them from the next edit bay screeching, ‘I will always love you’ as a bear roars over and over again… It was a little while before I could listen to the song.”
New episodes of “Sunny” premiere on Apple TV+ on Wednesdays.
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