Rashida Jones’s face-framing bob in the Apple TV+ series Sunny commands viewers’ attention. It looks like many different objects: a bell, a gumdrop, Darth Vader’s helmet. But the show is far less concerned with how people resemble objects than it is with how objects resemble people.

The artificially intelligent objects at the center of Sunny have personalities and priorities, just like people. They also occasionally dabble in violence, just like people. This is not something people tend to expect from their objects. When a man is murdered early on in the show, at the plasticine hands of a robot, someone offscreen announces, “It’ll be fine. No one will know.” This turns out to be one of the show’s central recurring themes: When would the general public realize it if AI turned out to be deadly? It’s an absorbing conundrum. But so is Apple’s decision to put out this show mere weeks after the megacorporation literally rebranded AI as “Apple Intelligence.”

Sunny, which creator Katie Robbins adapted from Colin O’Sullivan’s novel, The Dark Manual, is set within an unspecified year in near-future Japan. Apple TV+ all-star Jones stars as Suzie Sakamoto, a woman coping with the presumed deaths of her husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and their child, Zen—before learning that Masa led a double-life. Under the auspices of working in “refrigeration” at a tech company, Masa was secretly tinkering in the robotics division. Suzie finds out as much when one of her late husband’s colleagues drops off at her doorstep a mysterious, orb-headed “homebot” named Sunny. Although reluctant at first, Suzie can’t resist an object her husband designed specifically for her. Adventure ensues.

The dark-but-funny tone of the series, which premieres on July 10, recalls Apple TV+’s 2022 hit, Severance, which also felt beamed in from somewhere inside the Black Mirror cinematic universe. The mind-warping tech of Severance, however, is probably a lot further away than that of Sunny’s.

On the newer show, the AI-skeptical Suzie is a stand-in for the general viewer who grew up on dystopian ‘80s movies about sentient robots. She doesn’t trust Sunny, even if the homebot’s animated eyes are surprisingly expressive, and even if it speaks with the chipper-sassy cadence of a Southern sorority sister. Suzie’s fears are quite understandable from where we sit. But in the world of the show, she exists downstream from our present concerns. For Suzie, AI homebots have already outlived initial widespread skepticism, and hers is the minority opinion.

When Apple debuted its biggest-ever foray into AI during June’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company dazzled with Apple Intelligence’s conversational reactivity, but it also set out to address Suzie Sakamoto-like skepticism head-on, mainly regarding privacy.

“You shouldn’t have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone’s AI cloud,” assured Apple SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi during the keynote . . . in between explaining Apple Intelligence’s deep immersion within those details. The main selling point of having high-powered AI built right into one’s iPhone, after all, is that, unlike OpenAI’s GPT-4, Apple Intelligence will know its users inside and out, functioning as a “Gary from Veep”-like figure to help us stay on top of all things personal and professional.

Sunny the homebot is equally adaptive to the details of Suzie’s life—and then some. It correctly intuits that the sound of synthetic snoring might comfort its grieving owner at night. Over time, Sunny learns Suzie’s likes, dislikes, and habits—chiding her at first for using the word “pathological” too often before warming up to it in a human-like display of vocabulary-osmosis.

The homebot also emulates Apple’s reflexive emphasis on privacy, assuring Suzie that it’s being as mindful of boundaries as possible. When Sunny asks what Suzie just said behind closed doors, Suzie responds that she’s surprised Sunny doesn’t have supersonic hearing.

“I try not to use it,” is Sunny’s reply, underscoring how Apple Intelligence’s users will similarly just have to trust this leading-edge technology to not abuse its tremendous power.

So, again: Why is Apple putting out this show at this moment? It’s been in the works since prior to the pandemic, and even if it only wrapped recently, the company still had the option of releasing it literally any other time than one-month-to-the-day after debuting Apple Intelligence. 

There are two possible explanations for the timing. One is that Apple created this show as a psyops cover for the clandestine mass death and mayhem its AIs are already inflicting unbeknown to us. Only a tech company that isn’t manufacturing killbots, this logic holds, would make a show about a tech company that is.

The other option, of course, is that Apple TV+’s strategic content planners are just cannily playing on centuries-old fears about AI, with an entertaining, well-timed show about tech (and humanity) gone haywire. Vertical integration, served with a wink.

Either way—though quite likely the second way—debuting this show right now boldly forces the kind of Apple TV+ viewer who never misses a WWDC keynote to confront some deep and scary questions about the era we are entering. Is Apple aware of everyone’s concerns about inserting sturdy guardrails for AI? Apple is so aware, in fact, that it made a show about it. The show serves as stealth marketing for Apple Intelligence, while the arrival of Apple Intelligence serves as stealth marketing for the show—and that’s all there is to the coincidence in timing.

At least, I hope that’s all there is to it.