Mitsudomoe - Episode 2 (Dropped)

While a lot of people seemed to find Mitsudomoe's opening episode genuinely funny, I struggled to really get into it aside from the odd chuckle or two. Perhaps the second episode can prove me wrong and bring me laughs aplenty though?

Or... perhaps not. The first half of this show's second instalment pretty much confirmed all of my concerns from the first - That it would grind its gags into the ground with overuse even within the short span of their particular "arc", whilst also trying to hard to go for laughs by targeting easy sources of humour. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the first half of this episode, which basically took a couple of gross-out gags around snot and urine and somehow managed to make them last for almost ten minutes. The trouble is, neither of these jokes were funny the first time, and by the half-way point of the episode I was crying out for something different.


In fairness to Mitsudomoe it did at least do this via a change in tact for the second half of the instalment... except that wasn't funny either. The whole sequence surrounding Hitoha letting herself into Aiko's house to see Nipples, threatening him and so on feels pretty old already just two episodes in, and throwing a little slapstick humour at the problem really doesn't help at all either. The final segment of this instalment, with Mitsuba and Futaba out trying to catch insects has the most potential, but even this seems to lose its way and end up as an entirely unfunny affair.

In short then, in these two episodes Mitsudomoe has singularly failed to make me laugh properly once, which is a pretty shoddy return for a comedy series. It might have been able to get away with that had I liked any of the characters a little more, but really there isn't a lot to them beyond their placement to get laughs, and when they aren't forthcoming they might as well all be cardboard cut-outs. I'm sure some people will love the simple and dare I say childish humour Mitsudomoe offers up, but it simply doesn't tickle my funny bone at all. With that in mind, it's time for this show to gracefully retire from my summer 2010 line-up, never to be seen again. Come back Minami-ke, all is forgiven!

Mitsudomoe - Episode 1

With a staff roster that takes in a number of those who worked on Minami-ke's first season, and a similar slice of life outlook, Mitsudomoe certainly looks on paper like a series which could prove to impress in the humour department. Whether it can do so depends, to a large degree, on its source material however.

This summer season show begins by introducing us to a brand new teacher just starting his career, Satoshi Yabe, and an equally new and beautiful school nurse named Aiko Kuriyama - A pairing which soon grabs the attention of the three young girls at the centre of the series. So far, so Hanamaru Kindergarten.


It doesn't take long for Mitsudomoe to set out its stall in terms of either its humour or the personality of that aforementioned troublesome trio, a set of triplets with wildly differing personalities. So we have the strong and overly perverted Futaba Marui, the self-confident and decidedly sadistic Mistuba, and the mysterious bookworm Hitoha. These three characters and their personalities very quickly become the template for where the show is headed, and nowhere is this better demonstrated by the second half of this opening episode, which involves the introduction of a class pet which somehow ends up getting the name Nipples, thus filling the joke quota for the entire ten minutes or so that follows.

If anything, I almost get the feeling that Mitsudomoe is trying a little too hard here - Satoshi's over-the-top reactions soon start to grate, and I have a nasty feeling the three Marui sisters will begin to do likewise as the show progresses. Similarly, there are elements of the humour which work well, before being battered into the ground by their constant repetition - The girls attempts to injure Satoshi's crotch in the name of romance work for so long before the gag is in danger of wearing thin, and however funny the "nipples" thing can be at times it simply went on for too long in the end. Certainly, Mitsudomoe won't be bringing us any highbrow humour, nor will it set out to be as cutesy as Hanamaru Kindergarten - This isn't a bad thing in either respect, but I do worry that its focus is too narrow to last out an entire season without becoming boring and/or repetitive.