SHOWRUNNER EXCLUSIVE
Sunny creator Katie Robbins unleashes her kawaii-inspired robot into a Japanese noir murder mystery
STICK AN ANDROID IN a person’s home against their will and you’ve got the perfect scenario for murder and mayhem. Irish author Colin O’Sullivan explored that premise in his 2018 sci-fi/noir novel The Dark Manual. A few years later, screenwriter Katie Robbins (The Affair) saw the potential in it for a television series about grief, marital secrets, tech paranoia, female friendship and the Yakuza.
SUNNY DAZE
Robbins’s idea is now the Apple TV+ show Sunny, a darkly witty near-future remix of O’Sullivan’s book. Both centre on Irish expat in Japan Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones). She’s just lost her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and young son in a freak plane crash, and is adrift trying to figure out what’s next – not expecting that it might be a murder mystery about Masa’s secret life involving Sunny (Joanna Sotomura), a perky, bespoke home android he programmed just for her.
“I love finding humour in sort of the worst places,” Robbins tells Red Alert, when asked what attracted her to the book. “Japan is a place that I feel a great affinity and love for too. But then there was this story at the core of it about what happens to a person after a loss. How do we rebuild ourselves?
“I was also simultaneously wanting to talk about female friendships, so I changed the robot from the book from male to female and changed the way that Suzie meets the robot, and used it as a way of talking about female friendships in this kind of unlikely relationship,” Robbins continues. “They’re a bit of an odd couple.”
The show’s tone is also quirky, with a piquant blend of morbid humour, nonlinear storytelling and sleek, culturally infused tech. “We really wanted to land the show in a place that you wouldn’t be able to put your finger on when it’s theoretically taking place,” Robbins says of the show’s vibe. “Like it could be 20 years from now, or it could be right now, but just a slightly alternate reality of now.”
SCENE STEALER
As Suzie revisits old haunts and tries to uncover Masa’s hidden work life, it’s Sunny who eventually becomes her emotional caretaker and reluctant sidekick. Robbins says she went down the rabbit hole doing research, even visiting Japanese robotic companies to come up with the right Sunny for the show.
“I wanted the bot to be approachable and accessible, but not like an android and not overly humanoid,” she explains. “I didn’t want to go into any Uncanny Valley territory. [I asked] what was the least we could do while still making the robot something that would be able to extract emotion and that you would have as something tha
