“Anyone tuning into this 10-part series by accident will wonder what in the wide, wide world of sports is going on.”

Rashida Jones plays a grieving widow in Japan whose life is further upended by secrets about her husband and a cybernetic helper that shows up on her doorstep.

Annie the Clumsy and Rashia Jones in Sunny (@appletv+)

Rashida Jones, who can be a potent dramatic actor (Silo) and has always been charming (Parks and Recreation, On the Rocks), plays Suzie Sakamoto of Kyoto, transplanted American and recent widow. Her husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and son, Zen (Fares Belkheir), took a doomed flight to ­Hokkaido, which went down leaving no ­apparent survivors.

As the official inquiries progress, Suzie becomes the recipient, or victim, of one revelation after another: her husband hasn’t been in the refrigeration department of his company, Imatech, for 12 years; he was in robotics; the Yakuza know who he is, or was, for ominous reasons. He had also developed a custom-made “homebot” named Sunny, programmed with his wife’s preferences and more than a little bit of Masa himself. The company makes it a gift to the grieving Suzie, who couldn’t be less interested, still unsure of her family’s fate and too distracted to suspect Sunny might be a LED-lit Trojan horse.

Anyone tuning into this 10-part series by accident will wonder what in the wide, wide world of sports is going on. The opening is an obliquely observed scene of what is undoubtedly robo-murder, replete with blood spatters, someone having ignored Isaac Asimov’s rules (basically, that robots shouldn’t be made to hurt humans). Then, the PlaySkool-coloured opening credits, set to perky Japanese pop, suggest something much happier than what we’re going to get, which is a mix of mourning, mystery and Suzie’s fish-out-of-its-native-waters story. Having expatriated herself 10 years earlier, she has never learned Japanese, resists most of the cultural norms, and as a result has been at odds for years with Masa’s kimono-wearing mother, Noriko (Judy Ongg), who is difficult at best. ­Noriko is a shark at shogi (Japanese chess), though, and skins the other inmates when she goes to jail. But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

Rashida Jones as Suzie Sakamoto in Sunny (@appletv+)

Jones is not playing the ugly American, exactly, but she is required to be something of a sourpuss, which doesn’t wear well during the middle chapters of the series, when matters decidedly drag. She does seem impolite in her impatience.

There are subplots aplenty. Members of a mob family, its hierarchy in question, are scrambling to find out Masa’s secrets, led by the venomous Himé (played by the single-named You), a ­lethal yakuzette with a dangerously angular haircut. Mixxy, the aptly named bartender played by the wonderfully named Annie the Clumsy, becomes Suzie’s sidekick, though she is something of a ditz. And Sunny (voice of Joanna Sotomura) is an overly cheery, rolling metaphor for science run amok, though she is far too real to be science fiction.

Created by Katie Robbins (The Affair), Sunny is based on the novel by Colin O’Sullivan, an Irish-born author living in Japan. The cross-cultural immersion-aversion seems genuine enough, though Suzie is a character balanced awkwardly between grief and the comedy that threatens to break out around her, but never quite does.

Sunny is streaming on Apple TV+.