Apple TV‘s new Rashida Jones-starring AI thriller Sunny asks a time-old sci-fi question: What if robots became too powerful?

The series starts with Jones’ Suzie, an American ex-pat living in Kyoto, learning her roboticist husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and young son Zen boarded a flight that then crashed. Masa worked for a big tech company, in the refrigerator department, or so Suzie thought. The tragic crash and the arrival of a “homebot” — a robot programmed to do domestic tasks and supposedly make its owner’s life easier — suddenly unearth Masa’s secret life as a developer of advanced robots, not refrigerators. Soon, it’s clear he was also tied up in organized crime, a whole underworld of the tech black market from robot death matches to hacks that turn homebots into sexbots opening up to an increasingly bewildered, whiskey-slugging Suzie.

In flashbacks, we see Suzie and Masa first connect, but the memories are punctured with fantasy sequences in which Suzie imagines what she wishes she would have said to Masa had she really known. Her rage is palpable from the start, and Jones gives an acidic and yet still often humorous performance throughout.

Suzie’s new homebot is the titular Sunny, a doting, question-evading, and immediately irksome presence in Suzie’s unraveling life. Around the same time Sunny is dropped on her, Suzie also meets Mixxy, a lesbian bartender played by musician annie the clumsy. A strange relationship triangle forms between the three — not necessarily of the romantic persuasion but rather with Mixxy and Sunny competing over a chance to help and fix Suzie, who has intimacy issues through the roof that they’re both desperate to crack. The series’ best scenes usually hinge on these interpersonal dynamics between the dysfunctional trio. Since Sunny is programmed to help Suzie, she’s suspicious of Mixxy. It telegraphs as jealousy.

Suzie is a certified grief monster, often lashing out and inoculating herself against criticism via that grief. She’s a deeply unlikeable character with a wicked wardrobe, a combination I love. There’s plenty of evidence pointing toward Suzie being a miserable bitch long before she lost Masa and Zen. She moved to Japan seemingly with just a cringe American fascination with the culture and then never learned the language, blaming her dyslexia, but it’s clear she never even attempted a real effort, even after having a half-Japanese son and remaining in Kyoto. Her mother-in-law Noriko Sakamoto (Judy Ongg) is a bitch (complimentary), too, and Sunny leans into the idea of them both as imperfect “victims,” while also complicating Masa as the series unfolds. Suzie often doesn’t understand or think about the specifics of Mixxy’s life as a working class bartender. Here’s Suzie with her perfectly curated wardrobe of boxy-fit subtly designer clothes and platform boots and her home that looks straight out of Architectural Digest. Maybe she didn’t know the truth of Masa’s work, but she benefited from it, and on a certain level, did she even want to know about it?

In the best AI sci-fi, when robots become too powerful, it’s because they’re a reflection of the power-hungry humans who created them. As such, it’s not the homebots in Sunny who are the villains but rather ImaTech, their makers, and even the people who think they’re doing good, helping humanity. But when artificial intelligence is created in the ultra violent context of capitalism, it will likely have the propensity to become violent, too, to be weaponized.

Sunny raises questions that, again, have been raised by the genre many times over, but it does so in ways that feel organic and deeply embedded within the actual plot of the show. If a robot is programmed to fulfill the household duties of a domestic partner, can it be capable of love? Or, rather, can it trick the mind into thinking it is loved by this thing that is, at the end of the day, just a program? Even Suzie, ultimate robot skeptic, finds herself slipping into regarding Sunny as a person.

Too often though, Sunny cuts away from its most probing tensions and questions about artificial intelligence in favor of yakuza crime-thriller machinations. Perhaps there’s only so critical and damning of AI a series can be when it airs on Apple TV, given Apple’s recent proliferation of AI tools and services, including, alarmingly, actual home robots not unlike the ones depicted in Sunny. As entertaining as the series often is, it’s difficult not to think of these contextual underpinnings. Positioning the yakuza as the central villains feels like a way to pull focus away from the in-universe corporation developing ultra-powerful robots unchecked which, in a way, feels like pulling focus from the series’ Apple connections altogether. It’s a shame, because Sunny really is at its best when delving into the mess of interpersonal drama and tech dystopia in tandem with each other. When Suzie encounters a tech-based approach to grief therapy, she’s appalled, only to eventually lean on Sunny to help her work through grief. Sunny grapples with the idea that artificial intelligence has become so pervasive that it’s difficult to avoid (Google anything lately?). But unlike great works in the what if robots became too powerful? canon (I’m thinking of The Matrix in particular), Sunny feels less like a warning of the dangers of AI and more like another effort to normalize it. As a grief drama and character study, it’s thrilling. As a tech dystopia, it’s murky.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!