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Wednesday, 25 January 2012 00:00 |
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Dear Japan: Please come up with a better way of signifying second seasons than easily-missed punctuation marks. kthkbai. Wagnaria'!! (note the apostrophe, that's the important marker here) returns for another season of workplace based antics, and it seems that someone's rather keen to track down Yamada...
I always have a mild sense of dread when writing up the second season of a comedy series, because there's usually a small problem: what can I write, other than what I've already written about the first season? Wagnaria'!! falls into just that category. So first, a recap.
Wagnaria is a fairly typical Japanese family restaurant, with a fairly atypical staff: Branch manager Otoo is very rarely there - he's usually out looking for his wife, who went missing one day on the way to buy milk (her sense of direction is legendarily bad), and has to bribe his assistant Kyoko to cover his continual absence. Kyoko's an ex-gang member who's not above calling on her former associates to sort out any trouble; she's also rarely seen to do a like of work, believing firmly in delegation. Floor chief Yachiyo is obsessed with Kyoko, and spends her day keeping her well-supplied with sweet tweets; head chef Sato is obsessed with Yachiyo, but any time he spends with her is filled with Yachiyo gushing about how wonderful Kyoko is. 2nd chef Soma is outwardly cheerful, but has evidence-gathering skills that make anyone a target for blackmail; while Poplar, the most "normal" of the crew that we regularly see, is unusually short - and very sensitive about that.
Add in Takanashi (who's obsessed with things small and cute and considers any girl over about 13 as an "old hag" - with the exception of Poplar), Inami (a girl raised by her father to believe that All Men Are Evil, and consequently prone to decking them on sight), Yamada (a runaway girl who ends up living in the restaurant attic), and Maya (whose efforts to claim she's the only normal person in the restaurant are rather abnormal themselves), and you've a collection of people that you can really have some fun with. New to this season, we also have Yamada's big brother, who's trying to find his sister but seems doomed to forever be in the right place at the wrong time; and Kyoko's gang sidekicks Yohei and Mitsuki, who bring their own brand of chaos to the restaurant.
Despite the additional characters, the basic idea of the series hasn't changed: this is a seriously dysfunctional group of people, and the fun of the series comes from watching them bounce off each other in any number of crazy ways. You could raise a big issue at this point, and say that it's rehashing the same jokes over again: Sato playing with Poplar's hair, Inami thumping Takanashi, and a long list of other gags are recurring themes in the series - by rights, they should have worn out their welcome a long time ago. I have to say, though, that I never felt that it got to that point - there's just something about the way the show presents itself, and the appeal of the characters, that stops it from wearing out its welcome (and if the Japanese Blu-ray sales are anything to go by, I'm not alone in thinking that). The new characters show that it's aware of the possibility of wearing itself out, though, and they're a trio that fit in well with the dynamic of the show without anything really having to be changed to fit them in.
The old adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" certainly applies here, and Wagnaria'!! sticks to that. It's more of what we're familiar with from the first season, but that's no bad thing, and once again this is a really enjoyable series. Check it out.
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