Wake Up, Girls! - Episode 3

With their original management team now fully restored and not a swimsuit in sight (well, apart from the bit where, y'know, they have to wear swimsuits), it's onward and upwards for the Wake Up, Girls as they make their local television debut.

For this task, the group are split into two - one who have to do a piece on local food and gourmet in the area, while the others have to report on weather while immersed in scalding water.  Needless to say, only one of the two gigs appeal to the girls, and thankfully for those who draw the short straw a little persuasion changes the format of the weather report to involve wearing animal outfits rather than being tortured live on television.

Understandably, the early going for both of these segments is strewn with errors and dead air, but as time goes on and the group gain experience so their pieces to camera become more slick, and Minami even manages to bag herself a catchphrase while getting to enjoy her favourite past-time of eating a lot.  While her grandmother and her friends watch on with pride, Minami is carving out a place as a bit of a star within the group, and when the opportunity of a spot on a televised concert comes up the plan is to allow her to take a prime role in proceedings.  No prizes for guessing what happens next - Minami's grandmother is taken ill, and suddenly her appearance at the event is put into jeopardy.

As a follow-on from that uncomfortable previous episode, this felt like far more of an episode from a stock idol series - there are more suggestions of troubled times ahead for Mayu, but for the most part this was a dull "by the numbers affair", not helped by the fact that you could have dressed a bunch of bricks in animal costumes and I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart from the group here.  No, that wasn't me making a dig at the episode's animation quality either - all of the burgeoning idols remain as dull as dishwater, and no amount of associating them with cool animals is going to change that.  Again, perhaps this is in itself a commentary on the vacuous nature of the industry, but it doesn't help make things interesting, and I'd actually rather the girls just lean heavily on tropes rather than be complete non-entities as almost all of them currently are.