Rashida Jones befriends a robot in the Apple TV+ series

You have to give the Apple TV+ originals credit: They usually look great and Sunnyhis latest sci-fi dramedy, is no exception. The Kyoto setting is full of luxurious jewel tones and tasteful woods. The characters are chic in Uniqlo-by-way-of-Her His robots are portrayed in friendly, bulbous figures and bright, emoji-like expressions. A cool 60s soundtrack completes the slightly retro atmosphere.

But not all of the platform’s offerings are as narratively rich as they look visually – and unfortunately, this applies to Sunny too. It’s not a bad time per se; a twisted mystery, a colorful ensemble and the occasional big stylistic flourish ensure that the ten 30-minute episodes move along painlessly enough. It’s just a slightly disappointing installment that does a better job of hinting at emotional and thematic depths than exploring them.

SunnyThe lonely heroine of the series is Suzie (Rashida Jones), who at the beginning of the series is drowning in grief over the loss of her husband Masa (Drive my car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima), and her young son in a plane crash. If the recent incident has added to her unhappiness, it’s clearly not the only cause. Although Suzie has lived in Japan for a decade, she speaks only English. The only person she has left in her life is Noriko (Judy Ongg), her disdainful mother-in-law. Her excuse is that her dyslexia makes it difficult for her to learn Japanese, which in turn makes it difficult for her to meet people. Yet her prickly demeanor suggests that she may simply be more comfortable playing the perpetual foreigner who is owed nothing and expected of nothing.

Her grief doesn’t stay lonely for long, however. One night, a mysterious gentleman (Jun Kunimura) brings Sunny (voice: Joanna Sotomura), a homebot that Masa says he designed specifically for Suzie – to her shock, as she had no idea Masa was even involved in robotics, and to her displeasure, as she has long hated robots. As cheerful and caring as Sunny seems, Suzie’s suspicions may not be entirely unfounded: the series opens with the disturbing sight of a droid beating a man to death. Nevertheless, Suzie’s dislike is soon outweighed by her curiosity, as she becomes increasingly convinced that Sunny is the key to finding out who her husband really was, what he was really up to, and what happened to him.

Creator Katie Robbins (adaptation The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan) sends the duo to fascinatingly strange corners of Kyoto, from a severance pay-like basement laboratory into an underground robot fighting club and SunnyThe greatest charm of lies in the oddballs they meet along the way. You steals the show as Himé, a platinum-haired yakuza who is first introduced while getting a manicure while her henchmen torture a man a few feet away. The clumsy Annie brings a disarming warmth as Mixxy, a younger bartender who quickly becomes friends with Suzie over strong drinks and slightly flirtatious chatter.

At times, the show’s contrived quirkiness stands in odd contrast to Suzie’s deep misery; Noriko gets an arc toward the end of the season that feels more like that of a bored mother whose children have left home than that of a mother mourning the loss of her only child and grandchild. But all of the characters eventually reveal a loneliness similar to Suzie’s – and most of them, in different ways, see Sunny as a balm or solution.

Meanwhile, with each new clue, Suzie is forced to rethink memories of a man she previously thought was “just nice.” SunnyHer flashbacks adapt to her moods, so that a romantic evening is replayed as a colder interrogation, or a banal bedtime exchange is revisited in an angry, more threatening tone. Sometimes she remembers her husband as the tender husband and devoted father she knew; other times she imagines him as the cold-blooded killer she now fears. Nijishima embodies each version of Masa with equal conviction, so that we, like Suzie, can’t even begin to guess what kind of man he really was.

But if Masa’s unknowability is intentional, then it also reflects Sunny‘s most fundamental flaw: a tendency to keep everyone at arm’s length. In his case, it’s difficult to feel the full weight of Suzie’s loss when we only get a fleeting glimpse of her bond in life. In Mixxy’s, we learn plenty of fun facts (she has a bald spot on her head! She was raised on a farm by hippies!), but not much about the psychology that leads her to plunge headfirst into a dangerous mission involving a woman she’s only just met. Himé’s yakuza power struggles are boring when none of the other people involved are perceived as memorable characters.

Even Suzie comes across as a cipher. Jones plays Suzie’s sullenness superbly, refusing to sugarcoat the character’s pain or tone down her harsh anger. But other aspects of her personality, like her bossiness, seem to come and go depending on the needs of the plot.

In the meantime, Sunny doesn’t have a great deal to say about the possibilities or pitfalls of the futuristic technology at its center. “His goal wasn’t to teach robots to discover their humanity. He was interested in how they could help us discover ours,” one man says of a brilliant roboticist he once knew. The series is also primarily interested in Sunny as a tool for bringing people together or turning them against each other—so much so that even an episode set entirely in the depths of her mind (brazenly done in the style of a lurid and silly game show) revolves entirely around Sunny’s benefit or harm to the people around her.

Not every science fiction mystery has to Blade Runnerof course, just as not every dramedy has to be an intimate character study. But if Sunny represents a previously unseen boundary of the connection between woman and machine, Sunny is more like a fancy new gadget that might look cool on your desk but doesn’t quite live up to the potential you envisioned when you brought it home.