First of all, even though I previewed it I totally forgot about this series because the premiere is so late.  Every season seems to have one of those shows for some reason these days.  Second, it makes me feel really old that Kimura Ryouhei is playing a 16 year-old’s father.  I mean, he can certainly do it – the guy is flat-out one of the best half-dozen working seiyuu in the business.  But damn – in my mind, he’s still playing the 16 year-old, not the dad…

As for A Couple of Cuckoos itself, it was more or less as I expected.  I put this on the docket largely because of Akagi Hiroaki’s involvement (albeit in the ambiguous “chief director” role), and because Shin-Ei has established a pretty good track record for production values.  Plus, romcom – you always want those to work.  But I didn’t grok with any of mangaka Yoshikawa Miki’s other series, and the premise here looked really dumb, quite frankly.  Switched at birth I can deal with, but then engaged to be married?  Well, whatever.

For me this was indeed pretty dumb.  And indeed, it looked great.  The comic timing and casting is good, it’s the material itself that doesn’t work for me.  The ecchi humor is the worst kind of tired, recycled, slop we’ve seen a thousand times before (usually better).  It relies on stuff like wincest and blackmail which are the worst kind of lazy, brain-dead cliches animanga has to offer.  The whole photo blackmail thing is pretty much a third rail for me – I see that and I know check-out time is arriving and I need to pack my bags.

Bottom line?  Bad writing is bad writing.  Good actors and even a good director can’t really fix it – they can only plaster over the dry rot.  I can live with a silly premise but lazy and derivative execution is a deal-breaker.  Where writing is concerned, in a vacuum either mediocre content or mediocre execution might still produce something watchable – combined, not a chance.