Boy, I tell you what – this series is quite a specimen. I know I’d sure as hell never have the balls to pitch a story idea like this week’s episode. One can’t help but be reminded of Seinfeld, especially it’s meta storyline where Jerry and George are writing the sitcom within a sitcom and pitching it to NBC. “A show about nothing”, indeed. “A bunch of kids get a plate of jelly doughnuts, they eat them and argue over who ate the one with mustard in it. There’s a show. That’s a show.”
“Ich bin ein Berliner”. Contrary to urban legend the locals didn’t imagine JFK was calling himself a jelly doughnut in 1963, because Berliners never called it a “Berliner” – only people from elsewhere in Germany. Berliner Pfannkuchen are indeed jam-filled pastries, and Germans do indeed play a game where one or more of them is randomly laced with mustard instead of jam (a strange game to be sure). A subject of interest for a high school newspaper? I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder.
Last week I asked “Was this interesting? I guess, sort of”. Paste that here. When you describe this episode (Goc help those of us tasked with trying) it sounds monumentally dull. And I didn’t find it to be – so I guess if nothing else this was more interesting than it should have been. But that’s a pretty low bar. I feel like an idiot for not figuring out that it was Osanai-san that ate the grenade Berliner, as in hindsight it seems pretty obvious. But I wasn’t on the verge of falling asleep or anything as Jougarou was solving the case. Astonished that someone decided to put this on television, yes, but not bored senseless.
See, I think this concept works with Seinfeld (in all likelihood the funniest sitcom of all-time) because it was driven by humor. And in fact Seinfeld worked best when it was simplest – observing the absurdities of everyday life rather than contriving extraordinary events. Many consider “The Chinese Restaurant” the ultimate expression of the Seinfeld ethos, and that’s the vein in which “The Habanero Berliner” (title original) plays out. But this wasn’t trying to be funny – it was played straight. Can you imagine “The Chinese Restaurant” or “The Parking Garage” with little or no humor? Do you want to? That’s basically what Shoushimin Series in this mode is. And that’s why it needs plot in a way Seinfeld didn’t. And it’s already halfway over, let’s not forget…
Nicc
August 13, 2024 at 6:03 amAh, the Olympics are all over now. As usual, I’m going through the post-Olympics withdrawal as we go back to our regularly scheduled sports. Oh yeah, there’s baseball. How was that played already? I completely ignored the NFL for these two weeks and so I only found out on Sunday that the pre-season already started. It’s not as complicated as understanding the decathlon scoring table, but I’ll take it. LA is four years away and there’s the Winter Olympics in two years time as it heads back to Italy.
I too was reminded of JFK and jelly donuts while watching this episode. It’s fitting that it was an episode about jelly-filled donuts as it did feel like a filler episode. Osanai showed up briefly at the beginning of the episode and then again at the end of the episode and that was it for her. The rest of the episode was Jougorou and Kengo trying to solve the mystery of who ate the donut filled with mustard and who was hiding that fact. Except it was filled with habanero hot sauce and nobody in the newspaper club could handle the heat to fake it.
Thus, there was a second spitter! Errr… I mean, there was at least one more donut and that one was filled with habanero sauce. Some unlucky person then ate that donut. Yep, it was Osanai, who was both the culprit and the victim of this mystery. She should now know better than to pick up unknown desserts… It was indeed a weird place to put in a filler episode and considering that it’s a short series and I guess we’ll be back to normal next week.
Nadavu
August 14, 2024 at 7:03 amI was reminded of Monster and the white raw sausages the psychologist grandpa used to eat with Dieter/Naturo
I’m enjoying Shoushimin, though by this point I’m pretty sure what we see is what we’ll get. There’ll probably be some out-of-place character drama played out in the last two chapters, but other than that, it’ll be silly, unimportant mysteries all the way, I reckon.