Correct me if you see other examples, but there wasn’t anything particularly sonically of note technologically in the fourth episode of Sunny, the playful Apple TV series about a grieving mother, a pesky robot, and the secrets of a (seemingly) dead husband. However, better yet, there was a moment at the very start of the episode that confirmed the sonic self-awareness of the overall series.
Earlier in Sunny, such as with the one-sided conversations in episode 3, and with the sound effects and the introduction of language-translation earbuds in the first two episodes, sound was explicit in the show’s place-setting science fiction. Nothing new of that sort plays out in episode 4, but there’s a special touch at the beginning. We see Masa, the dead husband, very much alive. We’re initially led to believe it’s a flashback, because we see him dropping off the son, Zen, he has with Suzie, at Zen’s school — but we sense something is up when Masa starts whistling along with the song that’s been playing the whole time. It’s a fantastical gesture, right out of the TV work of the late great Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective, Lipstick on Your Collar), when diegetic and non-diegetic merge, when the way songs can encapsulate human experience manifests in what is, in essence, a kind of movie-musical karaoke.
Then the sequence splinters, and we realize this isn’t a flashback, but instead Suzie processing her sudden recognition that there is a yakuza, or gangster, element in their midst. The moment is fantastical precisely because it is a fantasy, a dark one, as her troubled mind, deep in mourning, tries to find sense in the chaos her life has become. It’s also a signal from the show’s creators that, yes, sound is a deliberate element in the story that is unfolding.