Parents' Guide to Sunny Nights

Casting old-pro comics like Will Forte and D'Arcy Carden in this oddball crime drama is either a curveball or a stroke of genius, because audiences come for laughs but stay for the bizarro mayhem. Even the business that Sunny Nights' Martin and Vicki run seems custom-made for a quirky li'l comedy: spray tan, made from the South American maqui berry! And indeed, the mechanics of the brother-sister duo trying to get their business off the ground does lighten up the death and destruction that surrounds, say, the finer points of finding an Australian manufacturer to quickly ramp up production, or negotiating for a bigger booth at a beauty products convention. The fact that these maneuvers bookend a scene in which the pair get rid of a dead body by pushing it into crocodile-infested waters is what gives Sunny Nights its singular charm.

Dramas in which hapless protagonists make a mistake and then keep making further mistakes trying to cover it up are classic in the thriller genre, and Sunny Nights amps up its appeal with its unique setting (Sydney's criminal underground) and quirky characters. Mony (Rachel House) is queen amongst them, the hard-nosed, brutal head of a criminal conglomerate who rules with a matronly soft-voiced demeanor. But viewers will quickly warm to Susi, a honeypot blackmailer; Terry (Willie Mason), an empathetic footballer-turned-enforcer; and Joyce (Ra Chapman), Martin's erstwhile wife who's wasting her journalism degree turning out 200-word clickbait articles for a news aggregator. Sunny Nights is weird, to be sure: You'll never guess where it's going to go next, and that's exactly why you'll love it.