Jarinko Chie (TV)

I watched this TV series because I enjoyed the movie and expected it to be a fuller treatment of the ideas seen there, like the pathos of Chie being a tough girl who’s actually carrying the sadness of her separated parents and her deadbeat father leaving her to earn money by operating the family’s tiny grilled meat restaurant by herself.

However, only a handful or less of the series’ episodes touch on these ideas, and all are within the first 15 episodes. The storyline about the separation of Chie’s parents reaches a conclusion surprisingly quickly and has surprisingly little effect on the series after. ... With Chie’s motivations neutralized, she’s reduced to playing straight-man to her father, Tetsu, whose antics as an overgrown juvenile delinquent takes over the series completely.

Given the shift from comedy with occasional dramatic elements to complete comedy happened so soon, I would be happy to forget it if it became a notably strong comedy, but that’s not the case. It has its moments but nothing I’d care to watch a second time and it has a strangely relaxed pace where it will take multiple episodes to build up to a simple comedy idea like a neighborhood sumo tournament or a rugby match between police and local mischief makers. Sometimes the set piece scene is good when it finally gets there but I found myself wishing it’d just get to the point sooner. The final 10 or more episodes seem to slow down even more than that and I found myself finally getting impatient with the series. If I'd had more than a handful of episodes to go I may have dropped it.

By the end I’d had more than enough. The movie left me eager to try this series, but this series has left me uninterested in watching the second TV series which is apparently more of the same.