evergrn

very sophisticated commentary from @freecia as always.

It seems Japantv and iSakura have a lot of reliability issues.
I've never heard of Viki and need to look into it.
The slingbox seemed to be working out well for my friends.

Kahogo no Kahoko is a good one.
I don't really get offended by most types of humor/portrayal. I just like to watch stuff casually for pure entertainment value, but I need to be mindful of that when recommending shows to others. The only thing that I find off-putting about Jpn TV is all those shows that feature gaijins who go around experiencing different things in Jpn and make them talk about how great Jpn is. But I guess we're talking about dramas here.

Your youtube link at the end is pretty funny.

abmj-jr

One observation I made while watching Japanese TV is that the quality of Japanese actors tends to be quite high but gaijins who occasionally appear in those shows are almost universally very bad. Coupled with the fact that the Japanese writers and directors simply do not understand westerners well enough to portray them realistically makes me cringe whenever the show calls for such characters. Perhaps seeing a character who is supposed to be American but is speaking his lines with a heavy Aussie accent doesn't bother the Japanese viewers, who are reading kanji subtitles, but it certainly bothers me. I suppose that as long as he is "white" and speaking English is good enough.

Gradfly

Last drama that I got into was Midnight Diner/Shinya shokudō. Stumbled upon it (one of the movies) during a TPAC flight and then found that the latest season was on Netflix. It's a slice of life drama and I like that the stories are all self-contained within an episode.

msp3

Don't like dramas, but I'm a sucker for those variety shows with 3rd rate celebrities talking .... about each other, making up ........ reactions and nonsensical descriptions when eating food

evergrn

There was a sumo wrestler from Latvia named Baruto who retired from sumo about 5yrs ago. I didn’t even know he is now acting in Jpn but he actually played a gay Canadian guy in a serious TV drama over there recently.

ksandness

I never got into taiga dorama, either.

I liked Hamidashi Keiji: Jounetsu Kei with Shibata Kyouhei, Kaseifu wa Mita with Ichihara Etsuko, and the Chihou Kisha series with Mizutani Yutaka. I sometimes thought that the audience for cozy mysteries might like Hagure Keiji: Junjou Ha, with Fujita Makoto. There was also one called Takushii Doraibaa, but I can't remember who starred in it.

Note that Ichihara Etsuko and Fujita Makoto are both deceased. This is how out-of-date my knowledge of Japanese TV is.

But I watched Midnight Diner on Netflix, and it was a friend who has no connection with Japan who told me about it.

Pureboy

Slightly OT but I found amusing: When I went to Japan for the first time in the Summer of 2000 (after the equivalent of three years language and cultural study in U.S. university) I met another American who had advanced Japanese language skills. He told me that he saw Japanese variety/talk shows and really wanted to know what they were laughing at so frequently. So he put in the years of hard study to attain a level of fluency... and eventually realized that what they were saying on those shows wasn't really that funny. While my skills never reached that level of fluency, I found that for an American, the reactions on these shows were almost always hyperbolic to what was said / happening.

Humor is definitely culture-based.

ainternational

Midnight Diner -> Enjoyable, but was told this was B or C rate in Japan

My Husband Doesn’t Fit -> Bizarre and yes it means what you think it does

Both are on Netflix with English subtitles. I find UA and NH flights to be the best source of Japanese movies with English subtitles.

ksandness

I find the talk shows to be akin to the travel and shopping/restaurant shows, where every product or food that the TV presenter tries is the most fantastic thing that ever existed since the beginnings of the universe. Everything that every restaurant serves receives a high-pitched, drawn-out, "Waaaa, oishii" ("Wooow, de-LI-ci-ous!") reaction from the young women who tend to host these shows. Similarly, everything that a guest on the Japanese talk shows says is automatically hilarious (and repeated in captions).

Just once I'd like to see a presenter sample some restaurant's menu item, make a face, and react with, "Ara! Mazui! Taberu mon ka?" ("Ugh, tastes terrible! Am I expected to eat this?")

abmj-jr

Or even "Meh! It's ok, I guess."

Gradfly

Neflix released the latest season sometime this week.

evergrn

Ossans Love 2 just started. This time the characters work for an airline, and apparently Peach Air cooperated with filming.

I think I’ve seen last years original series on EVA and JALs IFE. Maybe this second one will make it onto someone’s IFE.

abmj-jr

If you are interested in shows about aviation, there was a drama a few years ago called Tokyo Airport: Air Traffic Controller that didn't completely suck. It was a typical melodrama but was shot at and around Haneda.

evergrn

actually, Ossans Love is about gay love. it is a gay love comedy

Nagasaki Joe

When I lived in Japan in the mid-70s, my living situation did not permit me to watch TV, except when I spent three months in Tokyo for one summer. Of course, there was no cable TV with foreign programs back then, so I only watched Japanese TV programs when I had the chance. Cable TV with foreign programs would not arrive until the late 1980s, and then, only certain residences (usually luxury residences designed for foreigners or embassy housing) were wired to receive it at a high cost.

The first TV drama I remember watching was the detective drama “Taiyo ni Hoero!” starring Watari Tetsuya. He later starred in another police/crime drama, “Daitokai Series,” around the same time. In the 80s, I watched the police/crime drama “Seibu Keisatsu,” in which he also starred. He had a great face that made him a natural for the hard-boiled crime/action genre and always looked tough and cool in sunglasses. Watari also starred in the 1966 Yakuza movie “Tokyo Drifter.” The other drama that I watched a lot was “Abarenbo Shogun,” a very popular jidaigeki that debuted in 1978 and ran for about 25 years. I've even seen it on cable TV in the US a number of years ago. These were all popular dramas of their time that were fun to watch and ranked above most of the other dramas that had lower production values and were were very much a mixed bag.

In the early days, when everything was new, Japanese TV programs were fun to watch and a great aid to learning Japanese, but I’m not a fan of most of today’s dramas (Japanese or foreign), so I watch less TV, which isn’t a bad thing.