More robots are coming to Apple TV+. The streamer has ordered a ten-episode season of Sunny, “a darkly comedic drama” starring Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation, above). The series is based on Colin O’Sullivan’s novel The Dark Manual, and follows a woman named Suzie (Jones) who is given a robot named Sunny after her husband and son vanish in a plane crash. But where there are high-tech robots, there are inevitably secrets, and once the two become friends, they start digging into what really happened to Suzie’s family.
The series comes from the studio A24 and is created by Katie Robbins, a staff writer on The Affair and The Last Tycoon. Jones is an executive producer as well as the show’s star; she’s also in Apple TV+’s upcoming Wool, an adaptation of Hugh Howey’s series.
The summary for the novel on which Sunny is based seems to hint that the scale is bigger than one woman and her “homebot”:
Susie Sakamoto, an Irishwoman in Japan, spends her days drinking heavily and cursing the home robot that takes care of all her domestic needs. She despises the thing her dead husband designed and is under the impression that it is about to do her harm.
To escape the overwhelming grief of her missing family, she takes to the nighttime and the lawless section of the city, loitering in seedy bars with her wild, drug-fuelled, hypersexual friend, Mixxy.
Are Susie’s persecutions merely a result of her own paranoia? Can the parliament of owls gathering eerily in the trees outside be of any significance, any assistance? Or will she have to search for the mythic Dark Manual, to find a way to finally switch off the homebot and end her litany of woes?
…it might already be too late…the machines are on the rise.
Of course, who knows how much of this makes its way into the adaptation, which sounds more focused on Suzie’s relationship with Sunny the robot. Lucy Tcherniak (Station Eleven) is on board to direct and executive produce, and the series will be written and executive produced by creator Robbins, Ravi Nandan and Jess Lubben.
No further casting or premiere date has been announced.
