Sunny Nights review: colourful Sydney crime drama mostly hits the right notes

Early in the first episode of Stan’s Sydney-set Sunny Nights, one of the central characters asks the always topical question, ‘Does this country smell weird?’

After a steady run of streaming series where the overseas cast are either playing Australians or their overseas origins are brushed aside with a line or two, one of the more refreshing things about Sunny Nights is that it doesn’t pretend the two leads are from anywhere but the good old USA.

To be fair, it’d be a bit difficult to pretend otherwise when one of the leads is Will Forte, but it still opens the door to jokes about chilly Australian winters and the possible noxious odour that permeates this great brown land.

Sunny Nights is a colourful take on Sydney’s underbelly

Kicking off with a fairly hefty crocodile making its way through the sewers to an inner city golf course before being exploded for its troubles, Sunny Nights is the kind of crime drama that’s populated with characters best described as ‘colourful’. Standover men with a sensitive side, mob bosses having a bit of a midlife crisis, exploding wildlife, that kind of thing.

Our companions in this trip through Sydney’s underbelly are siblings Martin (Forte) and Vicki Marvin (D’Arcy Carden), would-be spray tan mavens with a hot new product – Tansform – that may or may not be any good.

Martin is the older, meeker brother, who’s come on board mostly because it’ll involve a trip to Australia. Publicly, they’re in Australia because our sun sucks (‘cancer’) and if you can make it here in tanning, you can make it anywhere; privately, it’s also the home of Martin’s ex, the tabloid journo Joyce (Ra Chapman), who he’s hoping to win back with his new life choices.

His younger sister has a backstory that largely involves selling stolen spray tan (and going to jail for her efforts) but now she’s totally legit… well, aside from not bothering to book in at the fancy hotel they’re using to promote Tansform.

She’s the more impulsive, hot-headed, troublemaking half of the duo – which is a little ironic, because it turns out it’s Martin that’s the one who gets them in trouble.

From bad to worse: Sunny Nights works the playbook

After Joyce knocks him back – seems she’s had enough of him not following through on his big promises – he tries to drown his sorrows at the convention centre hotel bar while Vicki is off trying to impress possible clients. When Susi (Jessica De Gouw) starts chatting to him, it doesn’t take long for them to spark up a connection. Next stop, a nearby wine bar, and from there…

Okay, the next stop is trouble, because Susi is a con artist and their one night stand is just a quick way for her to gather blackmail material. Now her boss is demanding ten grand from Martin or the footage goes public.

Extremely keen to make sure Joyce never sees it, but with a lot less than ten grand handy thanks to all their tan promotional efforts, Martin and Vicki need money fast.

Enter Terry (former NRL player Willie Mason), an ex-rugby player turned standover man. Even at the best of times, he’s not someone you want to owe money to, and things for the Marvins are about to become a lot more dangerous.

And that’s before we circle back to the exploded croc from the opening scene, who happens to have the hand of a dead criminal in its guts. Is that dead criminal’s hand pointing directly at Martin and Vicki? It wouldn’t be a crime story if things didn’t keep on getting worse.

Watch the Sunny Nights trailer

American stars bring the comedy

Tone is a tricky thing with this kind of story, but for the most part Sunny Nights hits the right notes. A large part of that is down to the chemistry between Forte and Carden, who are playing characters probably too dissimilar to be all that convincing as siblings but who definitely work well as a comedy double act.

Forte is a special stand out as the meek Marvin, a man who finds his spine just in time to wonder if he really wants to fight for the life he’s made for himself. Forte is always engaging, his low-key desperation giving the collection of dubious types and outright freaks around him a grounding the story needs.

This kind of heightened crime drama – think the recent Apple series Bad Monkey, or the more out-there big and small screen Elmore Leonard adaptations – relies as much on surprise twists as colourful characters.

Eight episodes is a long time to spend with a bunch of lowlifes, but this piles on enough surprise developments to make each instalment fly by.

Tansform turns out to be (possibly) a viable business if they can pour enough money into it, Terry has troubles of his own, Martin isn’t giving up on Joyce any time soon and she’s hot on the trail of a scoop that could blow more than a crocodile’s guts wide open.

Speaking of which, wildlife wrangler Nova (Megan Wilding) is also keen to find out what a hand was doing in a croc’s stomach, and it turns out being a detective is way more interesting than collecting stray reptiles.

There’s not a lot of substance here, but it does pretty much what it says on the tin. It moves fast, the characters are colourful, Forte is always sympathetic so it feels like there’s actually something at stake, and the jokes aren’t essential so it doesn’t really matter if they’re not all winners.

It’s all about as deep as a layer of fake tan; exactly what you want from summertime viewing.

Sunny Nights premieres on Stan, with all eight episodes available from 26 December.

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