Sunny (2024)

Season Two Was the Missing Episode

I liked this. I actually did. But I won’t pretend I didn’t have issues. So, I will start with what worked because a lot of it really did.
First and foremost the length. Ten half-hour episodes. That alone saved this show from becoming a chore. I never once felt like I was forcing myself to finish it.
Second, the cinematography. Genuinely beautiful. Every frame looked like it could be paused and framed. The color grading, the composition everything felt intentional.
Third and honestly my favorite part: the music. This small show had no right having such a good soundtrack. The choices, the timing, the vibes INSANE. When The Great Pretender played at the end, that was peak. Absolute peak. And the intro??? So good. Never skipped it once.
Acting-wise no real complaints. Everyone did their job well. The characters are weird, but the premise itself is weird, so it works. It’s good weird.
Now the story. On paper, I love it. A woman loses her husband and son in a plane crash, gets a home robot as a companion, then slowly realizes her husband wasn’t who she thought he was and sets out to uncover the truth. That plot is solid. Really solid.
The characters too( Suzie, Noriko, Masa, Hime) they are all interesting. I like them.
But this is where the show starts holding itself back.
The biggest problem is time. (Yes I liked them because it was short but that’s also a problem) Ten short episodes just are not enough. We understand what each character wants, but we barely know them. Everything feels slightly underdeveloped.
Suzie and Masa especially. We are told they were this perfect couple until the very end, but we don’t see enough of it. A few more moments between them would have gone a long way. Instead a lot of time is spent watching Suzie drink away her sadness. I get why she is doing it but come on those moments can be just implied. The time should have been used for something better. We were clearly promised some detective work Suzie digging into her husband’s company, connecting dots, uncovering secrets. And we barely got that, we got them…not enough.
The Yakuza storyline also felt off. They are there from the beginning, yet their motivations are never fully explained. How was the dark manual created? Why do the Yakuza want it so badly? Why did they want Masa dead? They already don’t hesitate to kill people, so why the sudden need for robots to do it? Discretion? Distance? Control? The show never really tells us. It just expects us to accept it.
Suzie as a character is… complicated. I like her, but I also want to smack her. She has a terrible personality and Masa clearly loved her like, really loved her for that? Sure. I can accept that. She is flawed, abrasive, messy. Fine.
But…….
Suzie is painfully naive. She barely questions her husband’s job. “He works in refrigerators” somehow explains everything? Fine, I can suspend disbelief there it did look like masa has a wealthy background, tech salaries, whatever.
But what I cannot stand is how blindly she trusts Mixxy. Every single time Mixxy was on screen, my alarm bells were screaming. And Suzie just… ignores all of it. Girl, please.

Which brings me to what annoyed me the most.
This was sold as a story about a human(suzie) and a homebot(sunny) uncovering the truth together. And instead it became mostly Suzie and Mixxy, with Sunny occasionally helping. I hated that. Sunny was the most interesting part of the dynamic and she kept getting pushed aside. Massive W for Sunny for not trusting Mixxy, by the way. She was right. And I loved Sunny and her attitude.
Suzie and Noriko, though? Always a win. Every scene they had together was funny. Noriko rage baiting Suzie the entire time was incredible. I really wish we had gotten more of them.
Also, for such a short show, there were a few unnecessary filler moments that just dragged the plot instead of adding anything meaningful. And the cancellation hurts. A second season could’ve fixed so much. This story clearly needed more time.
Rashida Jones was good, but I genuinely wanted more Hidetoshi Nishijima. It was painfully short and to think he was only a memory in each and every scene. SAD.

Side note: the casting for Zen was perfect. He actually looks like Suzie and Masa’s kid. White-Arabic and Japanese mix nailed it.

Final thought: this needed more time.

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