Mertseger
A Time-Travel Musical About Cultural Change
It's no Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and it's no Back To Future. But Extremely Inappropriate is, indeed, a weekly musical involving a very limited form of time travel. Written the extremely well-lauded Kankuro Kudo, the series grapples with current social hypersensitivity and conformity which has been intensified in at least some cases by social media. The initial impression of the series is that it's positing the idea that people back in the good old days (1986) would be able to cut through all the woke bullshit and restore some kind of social sanity to the ridiculous limitations imposed of today (2024) by SJWs and their ilk in business and entertainment media. But that position is a bit of strawman that Kankuro attempts to pull apart in the course of the series.
And so takes he the most obliviously sexist and abusive archetype he can think of, a high school PE teacher from 1986 (Ogawa Ichiro played by Abe Sadawo) and has him get on a bus to 2024. Simultaneously, a feminist sociologist (Sakae played by Yoshida Yoh) and her teenaged son (Kiyoshi played by Sakamoto Manato) are brought on the same bus from 2024 to 1986. Hijinks ensue in both time periods as the bus runs its route on Saturdays.
In 2024, Ogawa immediately falls upward in the business world by saying things that cannot be said in the current culture and ends up as the counselor in the standards and practices department of a large broadcast television network which allows the series to address various forms of social policing across the episodes. Meanwhile, Sakae and Kiyoshi are confronted by the old-school sexism and systemic repressions of 1986 while living with Ogama's daughter Junko (played by Kawai Yuumi).
If you are put off by musicals, you might still find this series tolerable. Each episode does contain singing and usually a production number, but they last no more than maybe 3 to 5 minutes of the total runtime of the episode. The songs are not terribly memorable, and, indeed, pale in comparison to the maybe two songs in Kankuro's asadora Amachan from 2013. However, the entire cast are surprisingly good singers and seem to relish their chance to use that skillset in this series. I genuinely recommend Abe's turn as a heavy metal singer in the 2018 film Louder!: Can't Hear What You're Singin', Wimp if you find you enjoy his singing as Ogawa in this series.
The time travel here is no more than a narrative device, and there really is no intention to explore paradox or establish any of the usual variants of timelines and their consequences. A handwavy shock occurs between characters if they are about to do something will cause a change in the timeline (except what it really prevents in the one instance that it happens is something else entirely that really does not involve a potential paradox). Characters go back and forth between the two eras in a completely chronological order mostly to see the differences in the culture that have occurred in that 38 years.
And so if it's not a great musical and it's not a great time travel story, why watch this series? The answer is: for the characters. Ogawa has a lovely shift in attitudes and understanding through his adventures in his future. His daughter Junko sees a world of possibility open up for herself when she sees the way the culture will change. The widowed Oagawa's love interest in the future, Nagisa (played by Naka Riisa), learns more about herself and her family. There are a lot of interesting and fun side characters as well as is usual in Kankuro's work including a self-insert of a television writer in a couple of the episodes.
I'm pretty sure the social critique did not work as well as intended, but I did grow to love these characters. I particularly liked Kawai's Junko though it's Naka's Nagisa that gets to do the heavy lifting in the series which she does with a deft comedic flare.
The final song of the series is a plea for tolerance, but, honestly, Kankuro's comedic study of guilt, atonement and forgiveness Saving My Stupid Youth (also currently on Netflix) from 2014 is much more insightful. I rate that and his Story Of My Family from 2021 (and also on Netflix) a bit higher than this series, but I do think this series is still well worth the watch.
And so takes he the most obliviously sexist and abusive archetype he can think of, a high school PE teacher from 1986 (Ogawa Ichiro played by Abe Sadawo) and has him get on a bus to 2024. Simultaneously, a feminist sociologist (Sakae played by Yoshida Yoh) and her teenaged son (Kiyoshi played by Sakamoto Manato) are brought on the same bus from 2024 to 1986. Hijinks ensue in both time periods as the bus runs its route on Saturdays.
In 2024, Ogawa immediately falls upward in the business world by saying things that cannot be said in the current culture and ends up as the counselor in the standards and practices department of a large broadcast television network which allows the series to address various forms of social policing across the episodes. Meanwhile, Sakae and Kiyoshi are confronted by the old-school sexism and systemic repressions of 1986 while living with Ogama's daughter Junko (played by Kawai Yuumi).
If you are put off by musicals, you might still find this series tolerable. Each episode does contain singing and usually a production number, but they last no more than maybe 3 to 5 minutes of the total runtime of the episode. The songs are not terribly memorable, and, indeed, pale in comparison to the maybe two songs in Kankuro's asadora Amachan from 2013. However, the entire cast are surprisingly good singers and seem to relish their chance to use that skillset in this series. I genuinely recommend Abe's turn as a heavy metal singer in the 2018 film Louder!: Can't Hear What You're Singin', Wimp if you find you enjoy his singing as Ogawa in this series.
The time travel here is no more than a narrative device, and there really is no intention to explore paradox or establish any of the usual variants of timelines and their consequences. A handwavy shock occurs between characters if they are about to do something will cause a change in the timeline (except what it really prevents in the one instance that it happens is something else entirely that really does not involve a potential paradox). Characters go back and forth between the two eras in a completely chronological order mostly to see the differences in the culture that have occurred in that 38 years.
And so if it's not a great musical and it's not a great time travel story, why watch this series? The answer is: for the characters. Ogawa has a lovely shift in attitudes and understanding through his adventures in his future. His daughter Junko sees a world of possibility open up for herself when she sees the way the culture will change. The widowed Oagawa's love interest in the future, Nagisa (played by Naka Riisa), learns more about herself and her family. There are a lot of interesting and fun side characters as well as is usual in Kankuro's work including a self-insert of a television writer in a couple of the episodes.
I'm pretty sure the social critique did not work as well as intended, but I did grow to love these characters. I particularly liked Kawai's Junko though it's Naka's Nagisa that gets to do the heavy lifting in the series which she does with a deft comedic flare.
The final song of the series is a plea for tolerance, but, honestly, Kankuro's comedic study of guilt, atonement and forgiveness Saving My Stupid Youth (also currently on Netflix) from 2014 is much more insightful. I rate that and his Story Of My Family from 2021 (and also on Netflix) a bit higher than this series, but I do think this series is still well worth the watch.
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