Another week is upon us, which means another weekly thread. For those of you out there that prescribe to the three episode rule of thumb for shows, it is crunch time for shows to prove their worth. As always, please use this thread however you like, whether that be questions, comments, suggestions, etc. Some examples might be:
- Who did it better, Frieren’s First Class Mage Exam or Harry Potter’s Tri-Wizard Tournament?
- Is The Dangers in My Heart a cautionary tale about high cholesterol?
- In Blue Exorcist, why doesn’t somebody cheer him up?
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I had somewhat limited time this past week, but wanted to keep working through my backlog of unfinished shows, so I pulled up the short (6 episode) series Looking Up At The Half-Moon and watched that. I think I dropped this after episode 2 the first time I tried it, but finished it this time.
The show is a hospital drama + romance, which seems unusual for anime. I don’t think I’ve watched any other anime set almost entirely in a hospital before – scenes, yes, but not the whole show. I’m not generally into medical drama so I haven’t really gone looking though; this is one I went into blind originally.
Guess which novel shows up again! Yup, it’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. I feel like I’m seeing this book everywhere now, and this show quotes from it directly; one of the characters has pretty much memorized it. Something I noticed from the quotes is that one of the characters (in the novel) is named Campanella – which should ring bells for anyone who’s played the Trails series… No idea if there’s actually a connection there, but I thought it was interesting.
The show strained my suspension of disbelief with how a number of characters acted, but did some things I found interesting as well. The doctor’s characterization did not go in quite the direction I expected, and there were a number of other surprises throughout. Episode 5 in particularly really went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. I kind of feel like I should write more about that… but it would all be spoilers.
You bring up a good point I hadn’t really thought about before, that the medical drama genre isn’t as represented in anime as it is in Western media. There are many examples that I can think of from US television (House, ER, Grey’s Anatomy, etc.), and I haven’t even watched any of those shows. However, I would really have to go searching to try to find them in anime form. Maybe games? I can think of the Trauma Center series of games which are medical drama visual novels. Interesting observation!
In any case, I tend not to watch medical shows because it is a bit too close to what I do professionally, and my suspension of disbelief is pretty easily stretched beyond the breaking point when it is in a field I actually know a lot about. It really makes me think that other genres must also really stretch reality quite a bit, but I just don’t know enough to know any better. Next thing I know, you are going to tell me that soccer isn’t played like it is in Blue Lock.
The classic anime medical drama is Tezuka’s Black Jack (there have been multiple anime adaptations of the manga over the years, the last one being the TV series Black Jack 21, from 2006). Other than that, there’s Ray (also airing in 2006), some individual episodes of Monster, and maybe the currently airing Surgeon Elise, depending on the direction it goes in? There was a period where you didn’t see medical dramas much on Western TV either, and maybe Japan is going through a similar time. (Now I feel old. 😭 )
Ah! More shows from the mid-late 2000’s that I am not really familiar with. I really should go back to those years and pick up some of them to fill in my lapse of knowledge. Engaging in conversations in this community has really shown me that I just wasn’t really keeping up with releasing shows during that time period.
For what it’s worth, Ray isn’t really worth going back for, or at least it didn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember much except the title.
Some of the Black Jack material is worth watching, but you can dip into it at almost any point from the 1990s OAVs on and make some sense of it, since it’s fairly episodic. The characters’ backstories are interesting, but rarely necessary for understanding the plot. (There’s also Young Black Jack, a more recent series—Wiki gives a 2015 airdate—that I forgot about initially which traces part of the title character’s origin story.)
Monster is worth watching on its own merits, if you haven’t seen it already (it was early 2000s, if I recall correctly, so outside your timeframe), but only the first few episodes could be considered medical drama. After that, it proceeds in quite a different direction.