How does this qualify as E/I programming???
I watched this on PBS like 20 years ago. One of those shows that earned a warm, fuzzy place in my nostalgic memories of childhood.
Maybe I'll start occasionally watching an episode to see if I can remember any of them.
Watchlisting, in large part, because this is early work for Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Elyse Levesque (Stargate Universe, and also a bit of Orphan Black). I can only hope to find the show somewhere.
I made it about 30 seconds into the first episode before deciding I couldn't bear the awful deinterlacing job Crackle did. Yes, it's available for free (at time of writing), but that's no excuse. Combing looks terrible. Deinterlacing video isn't a difficult art or science; it only requires applying the correct filter when converting the video from source to streaming-ready encode.
We'll see if anything comes of the support request I just sent in about this. I'll certainly return to the show sooner if I can view a decombed copy instead of the mess that's currently the only legal option.
More Richard Ayoade is always welcome, and I wish NBC had not dropped its plans to air this…
I'm not normally one to complain about slow pacing, but it's warranted in this case. This story could have been told in half the time. Not that it's anything to write home about. There's some potentially interesting backstory that gets no screen time whatsoever. The only interesting part is about ten minutes in the third episode when we spend some real, quality time with the Overlords.
Granted, I haven't read the source material. But given that this miniseries' contemporaries include The Expanse, I know that good sci-fi can still be put on TV in the mid-2010s. This just…isn't it.
It's so easy to calculate an average over a mere five episodes, but here I am, having lazily used Chrome's address bar anyway.
From an average episode rating of 8.2, I wholeheartedly bump this show to a 9/10. It's well deserved by the latter four episodes. The most Star Trek thing about this miniseries is that the "pilot" (not really) pales in comparison to the quality of what follows.
The biggest shortcoming of the whole production is Shatner's decision to sort of interview himself for his own feature episode. Sure, he used clips of other captains asking him questions to fill in some of the time, but a lot of 1x01 is contained in Bill's first-person voiceover. It doesn't serve his story the same way as it does the other four actors, and it's unfortunate just how underwhelming that makes the opener. In a perfect world, someone the likes of Gene Roddenberry would have been able to interview Shatner for his segment, but our world is far removed from that ideal.
For any future viewers who might look here before watching any of the show: None of the segments reference each other; they're all self-contained. Because of that, I can advise you to start with William Shatner (as one normally would), to get the abnormal episode out of the way first—then decide the order of the rest based on your preference. It might be best to start with your "least favorite" captain of the remaining four, if you choose to take this advice. If not, you'll still have a great ride watching in the intended order.
(Note: Cross-posted in the comments for both Season 1 and the series as a whole, for visibility, since they are essentially the same thing.)
(Cross-posted, with minor edits, from the season 1 comments.)
Well, averaging my ratings for all six episodes of the series gave me: 7.333…
Funny, that's pretty much what I was going to give the show. I'd be rounding up from closer to 6.5, but it is an entertaining diversion. The series isn't very long, so you'll be done quickly whether you howl with laughter at every episode or sit staring blankly at the screen.
There are some interesting facts in this show. Too bad they're dramatically overshadowed by the hyper-sensationalized narration that attempts to make the average viewer deathly afraid of anything technological.
Oh, and most of these aren't disasters of engineering at all. The vast, VAST majority of incidents this series scrutinizes are either natural disasters that no amount of engineering could prevent or protect against; or human failures of the people responsible for maintaining the systems that were engineered to perform well within tolerances. I'm sorry, but equipment that goes 16 years without inspection, or human errors at the controls, do not qualify as engineering problems.
Skip this.
Average episode rating: 6.25
It's fun. The cinematography is quite stunning, but I didn't find the characters or plot anything to write home about. It strains believability at times, despite the obvious "people do crazy things when they're in love" justification. (Speaking of which, this show leans pretty heavily on the love-triangle trope, too.)
Maybe the best thing to come from this will be exploring other works the actors in Gap Year performed in.
Skipped posting anything for Season 1 because, well, there's just one. It would be redundant to review both the show and its only season.
By strict average of my episode ratings, I should give this show a 7. But there were too many things that bothered me about the production quality, the writing, and directorial decisions to give it quite that high a score. 6 will do.
At least by the end, they stopped flashing us Meagan Good's cleavage at every opportunity.
(Cross-posted from the season 1 comments, since the show ended after just the one season. In doing so, I noticed that the current average Trakt series rating of 76% precisely matches my average episode rating. Quite interesting…)
Average episode rating for the first (and only) season: 7.6
I'm happy to round up. I wasn't sure about the show at first, but it grew on me. Then, when I had really started caring about what happened to the characters, it ended on a season-finale cliffhanger.
Network television disappoints me, when they don't give a show enough advance notice of cancellation to at least avoid setting up for a payoff they'll never get the chance to deliver. Even if there's not enough time to tie up all the existing loose ends, they can at least avoid creating more if the upcoming end is known.
Average rating based on all episodes: 7.9
This show deserves that and more. It's great in all kinds of little ways. I actually tried to watch the show as slowly as possible to prolong the experience. That there was only one season is such a shame!
Looking back at my ratings, there was only one episode out of the ten that didn't quite live up to expectations. Achieving 90% "Good" or better episodes is an achievement for any show, no matter its genre or country of origin.
The big thing with Time Taxi (also known as Great Selection Taxi in English, or Suteki na Sentaxi in Japanese) is that the individual episodes aren't necessarily meant to be memorable on their own. They all contribute to the experience of the show as a whole, building on what's come before to enhance (or twist) the overall effect.
Eda-san's incremental attempts to "enhance" the time-slip experience are hilarious. They get more and more ridiculous as the season progresses, and it's all because he's driving the latest Sentaxi model that eliminated the time-slip noise from the previous generations.
I also really liked how we gradually got to know more about the other characters that hang around at Café Choice. The show didn't try to introduce everyone right at the beginning. We found out who was who at the appropriate moments.
Fair warning for certain viewers: There's a considerable amount of "fourth wall" obliteration. If you dislike characters talking directly to the audience, this show will annoy you. Personally, I think breaking the fourth wall is great when done appropriately, and it is so done here. A tongue-in-cheek comedy like this (which it is—a 「ドラマ」or "drama" in Japanese television terms is a type of program, not a story genre) is perfect for that sort of aside.
(Cross-posted from season 1 for visibility, since additional seasons aren't likely to happen.)
By way of averaging my episode scores, this show should get a perfect 7.0, but I can't quite give it that. There's a long slump in the middle where the writing kinda goes to shit and nothing really interesting happens. I can take that kind of thing from a show if the characters are interesting or likable, but that's not particularly true of this cast.
Arithmetic mean of my scores for the season: 8.2727…
What I think the show as a whole deserves: 9.8
10 it is. What a stunningly beautiful series.
I would happily welcome a second season, but I highly doubt that will happen. The story is finished.
The setup is a high school concert band that wants to get to nationals…and there are maybe two pieces of music in the entire show? This was not good. The whole thing is focused around mysteries that the main characters get distracted by when they're supposed to be making music. They're not even interesting mysteries. Every one is the same: Stump the two self-appointed detectives until some deus ex machina reveal lets them solve it. Character development is mostly nonexistent.
I'd award an extra point for having a queer MC, but the show never actually does anything with that fact after establishing a love polygon in episode 1 (which persists for the rest of the series, unmentioned except for a couple throwaway comic bits).
Convinced to spend an hour watching this absolute pile of crap by literally my oldest friend. Am now questioning whether she's really a friend. But oh, did we laugh at this. It's SO BAD.
@LuckyNumber78, it's your turn.
I refuse to round my mean episode score of 4.91 up to a 5. This wasn't even "Meh". The few good episodes were completely buried by the worse-than-shit-tier writing of the rest.
Strictly speaking I should give this a 6 (episode ratings average out to 5.5 exactly)…but nah. It's too "Meh" to get anything higher.
General progression of episode quality is:
The pacing is shit. The writing is shit. Characters are mostly underdeveloped, and nobody gets enough time for us, the audience, to actually start caring about them (except maybe Maihime). I kind of care about Asuha, but only because she's somehow the most likable character out of the entire squad.
Aside from episode-specific problems I called out in comments on those episodes, there were many more that were too obvious or too frequent to bother writing about every time. Some of these issues made their way onto my grand list of series flaws. The first entry was actually the writing, but I couldn't hold it in long enough and so it's above here. As for the rest… here goes.
I could go on, but I've already spent more time turning my notes into semi-complete sentences than this series deserves. Just skip it; you'll miss absolutely nothing. I honestly wonder how I pushed myself to keep going through all the crap to get to that one good episode…which was then followed by several more crappy episodes. It would have been better if I'd just grabbed the ClariS ED singles from some random J-Pop music ripping group and called it a day.
Episode rating average (season 1): 7.333…
Enjoyment: 9
Yield: 8.1666…, rounded to 8
Penalty: -1 point for over the top, out of place fanservice
Not completely solid, and not quite up to the expectations I had for it at the start of the season, but still a good show worth watching. Alternate history is always enjoyable, though I question some of the writing choices (like the slice-of-life episode in the middle that did nothing for the overall plot, or having Bergmann and Izetta both be still alive despite heavily implying that both died).
I would probably watch a second season of this, but I'd hope it had less fanservice and more solid writing (with fewer "coincidences").
Episode rating average: 7.0
How did that happen? I don't know. But I do know that character development was too little too late for me to bump up the score any, so I'll stick with 7.
Based on season 1 (average episode rating: 6.83333333) I'm giving this a 6. It's pretty generic, but there are a couple stand-out episodes that make it a bit better than "meh" IMO.
Not sure if that tag on the last episode is a plea for season 2 or just a gag…
I really can't say much about this show, nor can I provide an average episode rating as usual. Back when I started watching R‑15, President Obama was just starting his second term in office. I'd only joined Trakt a few weeks before, and it would be two years before I started keeping track of anime here too.† My thoughts on the first nine episodes of this show are lost to time, because I didn't start rating every episode I watch until a couple years ago. Really, I have nothing to go on for giving this show a rating, but I can try to draw from the last few episodes, which I did watch today.
Fun fact: It took me 1,849 days to watch this show from start to finish, according to MAL. That makes it the top entry in my list of anime by time to finish by just over two years, well above Captain Earth (at 1,111 days) and Baby Steps (at 1,107 days).
Yes, I did decide to finally finish this anime because I started it so long ago. No other reason was going to motivate me. It's not great. R‑15 isn't even particularly good, and I really don't care for this type of anime. Of course, I learned that partly by starting—and then losing interest in—R‑15, so at least it was a learning experience.
But now I know. And since ratings are ultimately a tool to record what shows I liked or didn't, I award R‑15 a hearty "Meh".
† — I started off by tracking anime in the same place I always had, on MyAnimeList, and tracking everything else here. I'm slowly backfilling my anime history here, one show at a time, for lack of a script to do it for me—not that I haven't played with writing one myself.
Having just imported my play history and rating from MyAnimeList, I feel it's important to say:
If I watched this show today, I wouldn't rate it as highly. My rating methods—and the way I think about anime, in general—have changed a lot since 2013.
But, since I never re-rate shows without rewatching them first, and I don't want to rewatch School Days… Here we are. Stuck with a too-high rating for a show that I didn't actually like that much.
(Cross-posted from Season 1 for visibility.)
I'm not going to bother taking an average rating for this show—partly because I didn't rate all of the episodes, and partly because I already know what I want to rate it without needing the starting point I get from calculating an arithmetic mean. (I started watching Akuma no Riddle 1,646 days ago. Wow. That was back when I preferred to separate Western media and anime on Trakt and MyAnimeList, respectively, hence my lack of episode ratings from early in the series. MAL doesn't really have those.)
This show is… OK. It's interesting enough, and the art is pretty good. Featuring a different character in each ending, with a unique song to go with it, was a nice touch, and isn't something that many anime do.
The story did go off the rails a bit, though, toward the end. I lost any ability to suspend my disbelief, and kinda just had to go along for the ride while trying to ignore all the plot armor and such. (I wasn't entirely successful in trying, at that.)
At some point I'll probably watch the special episode, but I doubt I'll update my review at that time. There's not much it could do to change my existing rating. Akuma no Riddle (no, I will not use the nonsensical English title) is a solid "Fine" 6/10. If I hadn't enjoyed some of the ride, it would score lower of course, but I don't regret finishing the series. It was a decent enough use of time.
Wow, I don't even have to do the math to get an average rating for this show. With 8 episodes rated 7/10 and 4 episodes rated 8/10, the arithmetic mean is just obvious: 7.33…
(This review was originally posted on season 1, to allow for watching any specials before updating it for posting on the series page proper, but I can't actually find specials anywhere despite the three currently listed on Trakt. So I just copied-and-pasted the review as-is.)
All right, truth time: The only reason it took me two years to finish this series was the misplaced hope that ArtClub (the fansub tag) would eventually release the last three episodes of ArtClub (the show) so I didn't have to watch Crunchyroll's subs. Despite releasing one more episode (number 10) after a seven-month hiatus, ArtClub (the fansub tag) ultimately never finished the series.
Today, twenty months after their last release, I finally gave up on ArtClub (the fansub tag) ever finishing ArtClub (the series) and just streamed the final two episodes on VRV. The completion time of 840 days isn't the highest on my list, but I was probably far more patient than I should have been in waiting for the fansubs to finish. Goodness knows the blu-ray releasers didn't wait for them (variously filling in the last two episodes from in-house translations and/or Crunchyroll's subs).
Honestly, it wasn't worth the wait. I should have just finished this show over a year ago. Since there has been no hint of a second season coming out, I'll have to read the manga if I want to continue the story… or what there is of one. And since I'm definitely far more interested in animation than in comics, that's probably never going to happen—so the anime will have failed in my case, in the sense that all anime based on manga or light-novel sources are ultimately intended to sell copies of the books.¹
The main downside of having taken so long to finish the series is: I don't really remember much about the first ten episodes. That makes it pretty much impossible to write a proper review, but I do remember enjoying the majority of the series. My episode ratings bear out that recollection, in that none of them fall below 7/10.²
So, I'll call ArtClub (the series; or Konobi, if you prefer) a solid 7/10 and just move on to more recent material.
Average episode rating: 6.25
It's truly not a bad show—just not a particularly great one.
Of the episodes I rated individually*, the average was 7.125.
It is very much CGDCT, with a couple spots where the cuteness got thrown out the window in favor of pretty over-the-top drama between characters that's barely forgivable given that everything is exaggerated in anime like this.
So yes, there were a couple episodes I just didn't care for at all. Clearly I also had some trouble maintaining interest early on, since I took a year-long break between episodes 3 & 4, then it took SEVEN YEARS before I got around to finishing the remaining 8 episodes.
I'm sure the true average score, if I were able to include those first 4 episodes, would be lower. I somehow doubt that it would be enough lower to change the rounded-off value needed for assigning a Trakt rating out of 10, though.
* — This show started before I was tracking anime here, and possibly even before I started rating every episode I watch.
Average rating across episodes (season 1): 6.5
Subjective rating based on enjoyment: 3
5 it is, then. Had its good parts, but was far too bloody overall and didn't give any characters any depth. Not even the protagonist, really. Tried to be another Madoka, but fell far short.
Episode rating average: 7.333…
The show feels kinda slow for most of the season, like more should be happening. For the pacing, I'm knocking the score down a point. Would be more, but the ending ties it up nicely enough to make up for some of the slowness.
