Rashida Jones’ new series packs a lot in but still never feels rushed
Sunny, Apple TV+ ★★★★
Apple TV+
Don’t rush this intricately coded series. Sunny is a black comedy about grieving, an intimate buddy comedy featuring a robot, a study of Japanese manners, and a conspiracy thriller for our era of Big Tech apprehension. If that sounds like an overload, the show’s best quality may well be how calmly it overlaps these different traits. The narrative never feels rushed, and the show doesn’t rush you along. The characters, whether they’re eccentric or electronic, are waiting to be taken in.
Set in a near-future Japan that is neither grim nor dystopic, the story begins with Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones), the American wife of technical engineer Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima). Her world comes crashing down when her husband and their son, Zen, get on a flight that goes missing. Suzie is bereft, left with a protocol-observing mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg) and the home-help robot designed by her husband that his subordinates deliver. One problem: for 10 years, Masa told Suzie he worked on refrigerators.
Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy) and Suzie (Rashida Jones) with domestic robot Sunny.Credit: Apple TV+
That strikes Suzie as a worrying act of deception, but as another character later observes, why did she care so little about the man she loved that he could pull that off? There are two sides, often uncomfortably intertwined, to many of the ideas raised here. That extends to the characters, including Sunny (performed by Joanna Sotomura), the supposedly caring domestic servant who becomes Suzie’s companion. Both Suzie and Sunny are plagued with worrying memories they’re forced to reconsider even as they start to investigate Masa’s work.
Adapted by Karie Robbins (The Affair) from the novel The Dark Manual by Irish writer Colin O’Sullivan, Sunny adds in funeral etiquette, lurking Yakuza gangsters, and a slapstick human companion for Suzie in the form of bartender Mixxy (played by musician Annie the Clumsy). Influenced by both Big Hero 6 and The Big Sleep, the risks here creep up on you, whether they’re psychic threats or psychological failings. With its broad torso and curved face, Sunny’s comforting demeanour comes with an unsettling protectiveness. What, Suzie wonders, inspired Masa’s programming?
Rashida Jones and Hidetoshi Nishijima as a husband and wife with secrets in Sunny.Credit: Apple TV+
This is a terrific role for Jones, who is known for her work in sitcoms such as Parks and Recreation, but also buries herself in dramatic roles – whether it’s The Social Network or Apple TV+’s Silo – so that when she reveals her character’s true self, we see what we’ve always known but never acknowledged. There’s never one note to her portrayal of grief – it makes Suzie as foolhardy and risk-ready as it does devastated and inert. That’s perfect for a show where little is lost in translation.
With the Foodtopia sequel the Sausage Party team has grown up, but only slightly.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
Sausage Party: Foodtopia ★★★
Amazon Prime
It’s an unexpected but welcome surprise that the 2016 adult animated comedy Sausage Party has received a series-long sequel. The team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg imagined a world where anamorphic foodstuffs are alive, waiting in a supermarket like religious acolytes for their hungry human overlords to take them to “the great beyond”. Amidst horror flick chaos and wild sexual proclivities, a rebellion ensured. The series picks up directly afterwards, with liberty proving to also hold great risk.
If the film felt like the work of unruly, creative 13-year-old boys, the show has grown up: it bears the hallmarks of unruly, creative 15-year-old boys. Hot dog Frank (Rogen) and his beloved bun, Brenda (Kristen Wiig), go from carefree to crisis as their fledgling community strives to survive. They might even have to work with one of the hated “humies”, the bewildered Jack (Will Forte).
With returning director Conrad Vernon overseeing exuberantly crisp animation, the madcap plot references both how revolutions can veer into the reactionary and the attraction of orgies for foodstuffs. Each episode is around 22 minutes in length, making them, well, palate-cleansers if you’ve had a run of anti-hero dramas. The result is silly but tightly executed. The puns alone delighted me, especially a music festival featuring Talking Breads and Megan Thee Scallion.
An interviewee in The Man with 1000 Kids.Credit: Netflix
The Man with 1000 Kids
Netflix
While the premise of a serial sperm donor has made for Hollywood comedies such as Vince Vaughn’s Delivery Man, this Netflix documentary about serial Dutch donor Jonathan Meijer, who may have contravened numerous laws and the trust of recipients to father over 1000 children globally, is firmly lodged in the true crime genre. Meijer chose not to participate in this three-part series, which documents the sense of shock recipients went through and their subsequent efforts to rein in his obsessive actions, but it paints a clear picture of male entitlement run amok.
Emma Myers in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.Credit: BBC STUDIOS/Moonage Pictures/Sally Mais
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
Stan
Nancy Drew gets a coming-of-age quest – first party to attend, first murder to investigate – in this feisty if a little messy British adaptation of Holly Jackson’s young adult mystery novel of the same name. When 17-year-old Pip Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers) finally acts on her suspicions about a closed case from five years prior whose supposed culprit she knew, the high school student turns her investigation into a school project. It’s the kind of daffy, dedicated gambit this six-part series thrives on, as the amateur investigator stirs up locals who want the case left alone.
Abbott Elementary creator and star Quinta Brunson.Credit: Ser Baffo/ABC via AP
Abbott Elementary (season 3)
Disney+
Just going to keep saying it: the best sitcom on television right now is Quinta Brunson’s delightful but also deeply felt workplace comedy set at a primary school in a predominantly working-class Black neighbourhood in Philadelphia. The show has a mastery of the classical 23-minute network comedy form, complete with instantly knowable characters such as Brunson’s eternally optimistic teacher Janine Teagues that you can hang one amusing storyline after another on, but the show is also attuned to community expectations and, increasingly, the very real struggles teachers face. There’s great wit but also wisdom.
Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding.Credit: Anna Kooris/A24 via AP
Love Lies Bleeding
Amazon Prime
English filmmaker Rose Glass (Saint Maud) brings unbound desire and fantastical flourishes to the American neo-noir thriller with this deception-laden story about the lesbian relationship between a New Mexico gym clerk, Lou Langston (Kristen Stewart), and the itinerant body builder, Jackie Cleaver (Katy O’Brian), she offers steroids and sustenance to. With its roid rage and sexual jealousy, the plot is always on the cusp of crisis, forcing the protagonists in this 1990-set drama to take ever more risks to stay connected. Unsurprisingly, Ed Harris’ nightmarish patriarch fits right in.
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