(courtesy IMP Awards)
There’s a particular type of TV/streaming show around at the moment which purports to be breezily idiosyncratic, and is in fact just that, but which, once it gets going, pulls back the quirky facade and breaks the oddball tone, to go big and dark and reveal just what a bastard life can be.
They lure you in, spoon full of sugar-wise, with wit and charm and gleefully acidic humour before pulling back the heavy burgundy curtain and showing you an underbelly so bleak at times that you wonder how anyone takes anything on face value anymore.
Someone you suspect has never bothered to even pretend that you see is what you get is the protagonist of Sunny, Suzie Sakamoto (Rashina Jones), an acerbic American who comes to live in Japan to escape unexplained trauma in her home country and quickly meets and marries the funny and charismatic Masahito Sakamoto (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a man who claims to be involved in the design and creation of fridges.
Readers: He is NOT.
Quite what he is and what it is he has got up to only begins to emerge after his and his and Suzie’s son’s death in a plane crash within Japan, after which things begin “to get weird” as Suzie admits to someone as she grapples with the fact that she has not only lost the man she loves/hated/who the hell knows anymore, and her beloved son, but also any sense that her life had any form or meaning.
Sporting a playful but darkly meaningful ’60s vibe from the graphics to the cinematography to the music, Sunny is the sort of show that sparkles with vibrant wit and a deft sense of the gleeful absurdities of life while admitting, through endless grief-soaked tears and far too much funereal alcohol, that loss can be the end of us all if we’re not careful.
In fact, much of what drives this surprisingly playful show – dark things happen, and happen frequently and people are very unhappy by and large, even Suzie’s new upbeat barkeeper friend Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy) and partner in her unwanted mystery-solving new life – is a rumination, grimly told, about what happens when you lose the very things or people that have come to define you, for better or ill.
As an exploration on grief, Sunny may be unorthodox but the emotions it wears prominently on its offbeat sleeve really ring true, and if you have ever lost anyone who really mattered to you, currently or at one time, then you will find much with which to identify in Suzie’s heartbroken loss.
It’s clear she would just like to retreat to her bed, or even her son’s whose bed she often sleeps in to be close to him, but life after death won’t let her, especially when a man claiming to be from Masahito’s old employer, Imatech, delivers a homebot to her sprawlingly modern yet traditional home, and the eponymous Sunny enters her life, a robot created by and modelled after her dead husband who kicks things off by trying to be, well, upbeat and sunny.
That doesn’t go down well with Suzie who, in her overwhelming grief, has no time for pretending or vapid pleasantries and who almost immediately orders Sunny to go to sleep aka temporarily shut down, because she can’t handle the demands the bot will place on her, emotionally or otherwise.
But Sunny will not be denied and she persists and persists until Suzie is forced to accede to her undeniable presence, which is around about the time that it emerges that Suzie’s new life involves far too much contact with Japan’s homegrown oragnised criminals, the Yakuza, chiefly represented by a heavily Cyndi Lauper-like crime boss, Himé (You aka Yukiko Ehara) and way too much skullduggery and brooding, and sometimes violent, mystery.
Talk about life upended, and while grief often feels like that, like a catastrophic bomb has blown everything you ever loved and wanted to absolute smithereens, in Sunny it begins to look like that with all of Suzie’s old comforting assumptions about her life ripped to shreds and a dawning realisation that she has no choice but to start all over again whether she wants to or not.
What really strikes you about Sunny is now deftly it balance the weird and the wonderful, the connected and the broken, the lost and the just-out-of-reach found.
It dances between a whole lot of defined states with alacrity and real storytelling wit and empathy, and while you will adore how quirky it is tonally and visually, you will also embrace how emotionally honest it is almost every step of the way.
It doesn’t pretend that life is good before or after great loss, and while there are moments of real comedy and dialogue that zings and soars with buoyant hilarity, Sunny is also grimly acknowledging of the fact that sorting out the mess you, or those close to you, make of it is no easy undertaking.
These first six episode gloriously build up the mystery and provide some of the answers, living in both the present, where all the uncalled-for (by Suzie most definitely) sleuthing takes place, and flashbacks to happier and far-from-happy times – we see the beginning and middle and end of Suzie and Masa’s relationship and it is very much a rise and then decline & fall – while touching on how life has layers and emotional complexity that don’t respond well if at all, to being probed and investigated.
In other words, while we crave closure, and god knows that’s what keeps Suzie going through one gritty, awful revelation after another, which should just fell her but simply makes her angrier and more determined (mostly), but as Suzie’s relationship with her hurting but won’t give anything away mother-in-law Noriko (Judy Ongg) makes clear, tragedy and loss, while they open the portals of the soul, don’t necessarily lead to resolution and healing much as Hollywood would like to believe they do.
If Sunny, which is bright and light, and very dark and grimly sad all at once, makes anything plainly clear, it’s that while we might find new things to love in our post-loss life, we will spend a long time wading through it, and as Suzie discovers might find that all the things we thought we knew, we didn’t and that maybe all the rebuilding of life and hope and love you were expecting to do, is going to a far more gargantuan and troubling undertaking that you could have ever imagined.
Sunny streams on AppleTV+