“His goal wasn’t teaching robots to discover their humanity,” the narrator of Sunny, an Apple TV+ dark dramedy set in near-future Kyoto, says about Masa, a robotics engineer who’s presumed dead after the flight carrying him and his son crashes in northern Japan. “What excited him was realizing how they could help us discover ours.”
Sunny, the brainchild of showrunner Katie Robbins and based on Colin O’Sullivan’s 2018 novel The Dark Manual, transcends the traditional gimmicks and set pieces of Japanese-themed cultural products designed for Western audiences — Zen gardens, Yakuza intrigue, even an entire episode taking the form of a game show — to yield a taut, visually stunning, thought-provoking cautionary tale.
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