While plenty of Americans have welcomed Siri and Alexa into their lives quite readily, Apple TV+’s SUNNY puts a fresh and compelling spin on the relationship between human and AI companion. The series, which premiered July 10 and airs weekly through September, features Rashida Jones as Suzie, a lonely but prickly expatriate whose life in Japan is gutted by the sudden loss of her son and husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) in a plane crash. Days later, Suzie is delivered a home bot named Sunny. Common as home bots are in the world of the show, Suzie’s preference is to grieve in private, until she is told that Sunny was designed by her late husband. Having only known her husband to work in refrigerators, questions about Sunny’s origins and Masa’s past set Suzie on an emotional mystery through the technological demimonde of Kyoto.
Sloan Science & Film spoke with Sunny’s Executive Producer and showrunner Katie Robbins about connection, technology, and the ever-evolving pas de deux between them.
Science & Film: What initially drew you to this project?
Katie Robbins: The novel The Dark Manual by Colin O'Sullivan was sent to me back in 2018. It was an unusual thing for me to have been sent because it was in the sci-fi realm. While I am a science fiction fan, it’s not a genre that I'd ever written before, so I was surprised. First, Colin [O’Sullivan] is a beautiful writer. I was captivated by his writing, and by this kernel within the story about a woman living as an expat in Japan – which is a country I adore – who experiences the worst possible trauma. I have always been drawn to stories about how people cope in the face of trauma and tragedy. What comes afterward? What keeps us going? If during the worst time of someone’s life, her instinct is to turn inward and like keep people at bay, what would it take to draw her back out? That is what interested me about the home bot. I’d been wanting to explore themes of female friendship, loneliness and connection so it felt like an unusual way to do that.
S&F: Tell me more about your relationship to the source material. Are there other things you chose to strip away or add?
KR: In the novel, the home bot is male and an antagonist throughout. I changed the robot to being a female robot and adjusted the arc of her relationship [with Suzie] as a means to play with the themes I’d been wanting to explore. We also moved to the show to Kyoto. I loved the idea of juxtaposition. A lot of science fiction storytelling set in Japan takes place in Tokyo, which makes complete sense because it’s so cutting edge in so many ways. Then there’s Kyoto, this extraordinarily cinematic, historical city full of tiny streets lined with machiya townhouses. The tension between the old and the new in Kyoto was something I was really excited about playing with in the show.
I also created an arc that would provide the show with a mystery spine. Suzie receives Sunny in the pilot, not knowing that her husband even worked in robotics. This news to her, so in addition to creating a sense of mystery it gets to some of the themes that I was interested in exploring. We are ultimately so alone in our own bodies and in our minds, and you can feel like you really know somebody but how much can you ever really know the people that you're surrounded by? This key mysterious element within a relationship felt like a juicy way to talk about some of these themes.
S&F: To your point about juxtaposition, the retro, mid-century aspects of the world of the show really sing. I mean that figuratively, but I thank you and the show for introducing me to Mari Atsumi, the 1960s singer whose “Sukiyo Aishite” serves as SUNNY’s theme song.That time period held such a different view of the future. Even in the five years since you began working with this story, has your view on the technological process of the show relative to our own changed?
KR: It's so fascinating. When I started writing the pilot in 2019, I did a research trip to Japan where I got to visit some robotics labs so I had some sense of what was being explored by scientists, roboticists, and engineers. I also worked with an AI consultant, Nell Watson. We’d discuss how I could solve a problem, and she’d share a concept – for instance, one that comes up later in the series so I won’t spoil it – that I’d think of it as something so far in the future but she’d say, ‘No, no, no, this is coming.’ Later, we were in the process of filming the show in Japan when ChatGPT came out. All of a sudden, all of these things that Nell had been telling me were on the verge were suddenly real. Like you, I'm a writer so this stuff is scary. This is happening now.
Much like within the show, we’re always looking at the shiny toy that is AI and all of the promises that it offers, but there’s also a dirty underside there. We have Sunny, this character who goes back and forth between being great comfort and companion to Suzie, yet in the next scene she can suddenly be quite nefarious and potentially murderous. That was always like baked in, questioning the costs and benefit analysis of AI.
S&F: The second episode is called “Don't Blame the Machine”. There’s also this rumor within the show about a guide which enables humans to hack robots into doing harmful things their programming would otherwise prohibit. This made me think, do you see SUNNY’S central conflict as man vs. machine or man vs. self?
KR: The latter, definitely. What’s been so interesting in writing and researching this show is I've started to see connections between robotics and art. Everything human-made has the capacity to be beautiful and do good, because it is a reflection of us. At the same time, everything human-made has the capacity to cause great harm. In that way, artificial intelligence is like any technology. I think what makes it terrifying is that it's so powerful and stokes a fear of it surpassing us. It’s comparable in a lot of ways to nuclear energy. There was this idea it was going to be a beautiful clean source of energy and now we know it can cause great harm in purposeful ways, and it can cause great harm in not-so-purposeful ways. It’s Pandora’s box, but I think that we are at a turning point with AI. We are at a precipice where, as a society, we have to make decisions about how we're going to use this. I don’t think it’s going away, so it does all come back to us. This technology doesn't exist without our hands on it, and so we have to figure out how we're going to use our hands.
S&F: There’s a scene where Masa attempts to help Suzie as she’s struggling with a ramen vending machine, something common to him but unusual to her. Do you think our relationship to technology has much to do with our culture? Did your research illuminate many differences between Japanese culture and American culture with respect to technology?
KR: Yes, that is certainly true. I think within the Western canon, AI and technology are generally often viewed with a degree of skepticism. It’s the monster that enters our lives. That exists within Japanese works as well, but I’ve encountered a lot of Japanese literature around robotics with a more benevolent attitude. This is just me sort of surmising, but I think within Japanese culture there’s an idea that a thing can be viewed as a piece of the person who has made it. There is a respect for objects because there is a respect for the people who made them, and for handicraft itself. That extends to robotics and to technology in a way.
This is adjacent to what you're saying, but it feels like connection has so much to do with the great allure of technology, particularly communication technology. Within our show, Suzie has moved to Japan, but doesn't have the ability to speak the language, so she uses this like translation device throughout the show. That’s a great thing for us because it meant that we could put Suzie in scenes with any character we wanted and they could share a common language and it's great for her as a character. It allows her to enter a country where she doesn't speak the language, meet somebody, fall in love and have the interaction she needs to make it through the world. On some levels, that brings her and other characters together but it also keeps her at arm's length. What would it be like to have most of your interactions be filtered through an earpiece, and never really be hearing the person you're speaking to? There’s a distancing effect. I moved to Los Angeles years ago but never learned how to get around because I could use Google Maps. It’s a similar thing that is so great but also keeps us from fully experiencing the place that we are. There can be a unifying ability [to technology] among cultures but I think it also inhibits us from fully immersing in other places when we go to them as well.
S&F: Beautifully said. Speaking of, SUNNY’s visual world is quite captivating and immersive. In building the world of the show, were there works or artists you drew inspiration from or to whom you wanted to pay homage?
KR: Yes. Lucy Tcherniak, our producing director who came on very early in the process, drew a lot from mid-century, colorful noirs like Seijun Suzuki’s TOKYO DRIFTER. That was a key visual touchpoint she brought in and I fell in love with, so I began to incorporate it into my writing. We had an amazing collaboration. She's a genius.
S&F: Conversely, were there touchpoints you wanted to avoid in how themes around technology have been explored in the past?
KR: I am not so embedded in science fiction, so I wasn't actively trying to steer clear of things. Because the genre is not baked into my bones as a writer, I let myself be pretty free. It was a funny thing, writing in a country that is not my country and writing in a genre that's not necessarily my genre, yet this feels like one of the most personal things I've ever written. It was unexpected.
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