Here’s what you need to know about the new TV show Sunny: Rashida Jones. Robot. Plane crash mystery. Seriously, what more do you need to know?
OK, fine. Here’s more. Apple TV+ has just given a 10-episode order to Sunny, a new show produced by and starring Office and Parks and Recreation star Rashida Jones. It’s described as a dark comedic drama and is based on a novel called The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan. Jones will play Suzie, an American woman living in Japan who loses both her son and her husband in a plane crash. To help with the pain, Suzie is given Sunny, a robot companion made by her husband’s company. At first Suzie hates Sunny, but then they become friends and begin to piece together what really happened in the plane crash that claimed her family. Deadline broke the news, though the project was first reported on the Illuminerdi last year.
Joining Jones as a producer is the company A24 as well as Katie Robbins (The Affair). Station Eleven director Lucy Tcherniak is, you guessed it, directing.
Which all sounds cool, right? But things get even better when you dive a bit deeper into what the source material is really about. Here’s the official description of O’Sullivan’s book, which was released in 2018; it sounds decidedly more quirky.
Susie Sakamoto, an Irishwoman in Japan, spends her days drinking heavily and cursing the home robot that takes care of all her domestic needs. She despises the thing her dead husband designed and is under the impression that it is about to do her harm.
To escape the overwhelming grief of her missing family, she takes to the nighttime and the lawless section of the city, loitering in seedy bars with her wild, drug-fuelled, hypersexual friend, Mixxy.
Are Susie’s persecutions merely a result of her own paranoia? Can the parliament of owls gathering eerily in the trees outside be of any significance, any assistance? Or will she have to search for the mythic Dark Manual, to find a way to finally switch off the homebot and end her litany of woes?
…it might already be too late…the machines are on the rise.
There’s a machine uprising? A mythical book? Heavy drinking? This show sounds wild.
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