A-Channel – 03

I know that I praised this series and all, but as I watched the second episode of A-Channel something dawned on me: this series is really formulaic, isn’t it? This was less prevalent in this third episode, but still it stands out.

I’m not talking about formulaic in terms of cliches. These are actually fine in this series, especially compared to the other series of this season. Instead, the scenes in this series nearly always follow the same pattern:
– First there is a bit of a build-up: characters do something normally.
– A character then does something weird, random or strange.
– A straight man then makes a startled reaction.

And mind you, these scenes are often less than a minute long, and this same pattern just repeats over and over. The girls do alternate between acting as the straight man and the one making the joke, but most of the time they have fixed roles in these jokes. Especially in the second episode.

This is a very nasty flaw, and yet this was one of the few moe shows this season that did not bore me out of my skull. Sure, the second episode was bad, but this third episode actually started to mix things up a bit, and contained some actual good jokes along the way, something that a lot of other generic moe shows this season lacked.

It’s nothing amazing, but my best guess at what makes this series tick is that it has good characters. Looking back to the joke format above: that format may be bad, but the build-up is actually fleshing these characters out pretty nicely. The jokes themselves meanwhile, even when they fail, do not turn these characters into generic stereotypes, or force them into these contrived situations, but instead they play with their quirks.

There are some bad examples though, at which this show forgets this. This episode for example contained a really strange insert-song that was just there to fill up time, and the sole salvation of that school doctor was his shock factor, which will die out in a few episodes now. There are also times at which the characters just fall too much into their own roles, but thankfully moments like these are made up for by other scenes that do something completely different with the character in question.

That variety will probably be key in keeping this series fresh. This episode was a good example of that, because it did a good job of shuffling its scenes around, showing a lot of different aspects of high school life. Currently it’s probably at the bare minimum of not being annoying. It’s obviously nothing amazing like Hana-Saku Iroha or Anohana, but it suffices for now as something laid-back to watch.
Rating: (Enjoyable)