First Impression – WWWWorking!!
Same old Wagnaria, now with more double-u
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Three series was enough, wasn’t it? It’s not? We got more? Are you sure these people are feeling well? They are? Damn….ah well, one more time I guess… |
Hokkaido is a Cold Place in Winter
Just in case you forgot the name of the place after three previous shows…
This could almost be a horror series. Seeing as how this episode’s lead ended up more or less poisoned- depends on how much you love that gag, I guess – how far would we be from the truth that comes screaming at you from the dark? Welcome to Wagneria! You’ll Never Leave! Our people are so zanny! If looks could kill, if managerial standards were more lax. If parental abandonment couldn’t be spun to funny?! But in all seriousness, and speaking of the people, that’s why you come back and visit, isn’t it? To get familiar and cozy with a cast of character’s that make you laugh. And that’s pretty much what we get. Is the same place, basically, with all the same idiosyncrasies…
Is that Takanashi on the right? …do they both work for the same place?
When it comes to comedy, you need timing and chemistry. I’m not going to pretend that I can break that down for you in a short and simple blog post, and there is plenty of ink written on the subject already. But I feel this new version of the old place is doing quite well in that respect. And it has enough to make it differ from it’s predecessor. But more on later. For now the same type of comedy of errors and exaggerations are on the menu, even if the some of the hands change. Daisuke is a very different kind of jerk from Takanashi, and I have no doubt that we’ll get to know him over the course of the next few months. Is he just the less-interesting male form of Yamada? Will he warm up to the audience? Right now he’s pretty much our eyes and ears for the rest of the cast. And they love to screw with him….
Hana makes the deepest impact as Not-Inami
I could go into depth about the cast, but I won’t. Instead I’ll just focus on the obvious, the elephant in the restaurant. You know, I almost didn’t recognize Tomato-chan in the lead role of Hana, her playing such an obvious pain-in-the-arse. But as far as the opener goes, she’s the most remarkable. She’s really got the take charge attitude, whether you like it, want it, need it, or not…With such a lame-brain manager running the joint, it’s not hard to figure out that she figures she can run the place on her own, or at least just run with it til she get’s bored? If not, she wants to very much broadcast that the only person to mess with the new kid, will be her. The competition looks to be fierce, so expect her to fail at that creatively for quite some time. She got the upper hand with the valentine’s chocolates in the end. But he could visit a haunted toilet for real next time… It was nice knowing your innocent carefree life Daisuke…now get at it…
Fine then, meet the rest of the crew…
…it’s not like any of them are working…
What’s really amazing is that the Web-ban manga actually came some time before the Working! show proper. This is a predecessor, so to speak. So I wonder how much of it is first draft material that’s been polished up for this show? There are some many character connections that feel they’ve been shifted, and the half-appearance of Takanashi at the beginning was a sort of hand off, wasn’t it? Regardless, it’s the new crew now, and they are the right kind of bonkers, they did a good job hazing the new idiot. When I was on food service crew, the most I could ever let myself get away with is asking the new guy to “empty the water in the coffee maker” – the maker that’s hooked up to a water line, a fact the new one’s never seem to know…Or telling one guy to go down to our storage and get the A/C unit for the outdoor patio…Good times, which is just what this show aims to be, and hits the mark spot on. Enjoy it folks.
About skylion
All around nerd that enjoys just about any anime genre. I love history, politics, public policy, the sciences, literature, arts...pretty much anything can make me geeky...except sports. Follow me @theskylion
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
I think that a reset on a show like this is a good thing. For the most part, nobody was tired of Working! But flanderization of characters is a thing, so when a show goes on too long, you get stuck in this cycle of one-upsmanship, where the supporting characters have to one-up themselves again and again to be funny, especially when there’s quirks and relationships.
I actually think the other setting did a great job at unwinding that at the end, basically having everything get resolved. I’d love to see more shows do that kind of season-long unwinding, ending storylines, realistically fixing broken characters. And then we can get a new show, because the setting of ‘just trying to get along’ hasn’t lost its comedic potential, especially in a restaurant. It didn’t after Alice, or Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, or Cheers, or Two Broke Girls, or Chef, or any of the other shows that used the common setting of food service as a backdrop.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10997 comments
I also think this one does a rather good job of underlining it’s differences enough. The employment hazing was rather choice, so the somewhat mean, yet still light-hearted tone does the new show very well…