Underwear

A new employee at an exclusive lingerie shop is enamoured with the beautiful products the owner designs but has her own ideas on what is suitable for her. The series has a superb female cast and looks at the ethics of conglomerates stealing ideas from small independents and the struggles of artisans competing with mass production. The pace and character development is excellent and you become invested in the individuals and their futures.

Good to see content from Japan. Great production values.

I found the musical score intrusive and too 'on the nose'. Signaling what you should be feeling now in case you can't figure it out from the script - determination, inspiration, sadness etc. Lush, redundant and mostly saccharine. Especially that damn piano! Coincidentally just having rewatched The Birds which has no musical score at all. Wish there was a separate mute for the music.

Subtitles in yellow often lost on a light background.

A weirdly depopulated Ginza and too-blue sky over Tokyo. The distraction of anime-looking characters thanks to cosmetic surgery especially among the young actresses.

The melodramatic line readings and swelling music when someone said something like, I will make...bras that I like! The simpering overacting and fumbling by the doe Kiritani in the early episodes.

Male characters mostly emasculated or evil. What was up with the coffee guy? Poor schmuck.

Not crazy about the stereotypical work-life imbalance, would like to have seen some of the characters' lives outside of work.

Other than Kiritani, a great cast. In particular could watch Mao Daichi sew and drink coffee all day. Without music and maybe without that Anna Wintour haircut. Her 'regal bearing' is an inspiration, as is her enunciation which is great for students of the language.

This starts out with a girl who just graduated and she and her friend go to Tokyo to find work. The girl Mayu eventually finds a job at a high end lingerie shop called emotion. There she starts to learn and also implement some of her ideas as well as get on the owners nerves from time to time. She reminded the owner of herself when she was younger. As the time goes by the business gets better and starts to grow. Mayu eventually finds out that Nanjo the owner was planning on retiring and possibly leaving the shop to her. So she tells nanjo that she is not going to feature her line as it is hers and not emotions and that she is going independent. She did this so that Nanjo wouldn't retire. Nanjo eventually gave her the sewing machine that she first used when she found out where mayu was. Mayu returned to the store to visit and also visit Nanjo. There she starts to cry and Nanjo assures her that she is not going anywhere. Nanjo realized that Mayu sacrificed herself to keep her from retiring. The loose ends that I am referring to is what happened to Mayu's mother. I kind of suspect that maybe Nanjo might have had her out of wedlock which led to the divorce from her husband and in the end what was the result of Mayu going independent? They only show her sewing a cloth and nothing else. That's why I rated it an 8. I would still recommend it though. It seems like the japanese dramas have more control over how to do a series and not let Netflix interfere which makes me happy.

I was surfing Netflix for something new and started watching Atelier out of curiosity. I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point I was drawn in and couldn't let go. I'll save you the trouble of looking it up: Atelier is a French word for an artist's workshop. The plot is a fairly predictable Cinderella story (even referred to in one episode): Young country girl just out of school goes to work in the big city. The store is a high-end custom lingerie shop. High-end meaning all hand made for an exclusive set of clients, and costing $500-$1000. Mayu is a fabric expert, not a designer. I think what kept me watching was that the show doesn't focus exclusively on young Mayu. There is strong character development of the whole cast as the series progresses. The obsessed and perfectionist owner, the assistant designers, the business manager, etc. I enjoyed watching how the story developed for many of the peripheral characters we see early on. We get to see how they are really integral to the story, and how they progress and influence things much later. My wife asked me why I was watching a chick flick and my only response was that I found it interesting even though I had to see the whole thing in subtitles. Kudos to the translator for bringing out a lot of subtleties, double entendre, and depth. I have heard the Japanese language is nothing but such things. The meaning is well-conveyed by the acting which was excellent across the board. The only weakness in the cast was that of Mirei Kiritani, the lead actress who plays Mayuko. In many scenes she just comes across as a stereotyped young Japanese girl, the kind we see portrayed too often. (Maybe that really is how they act? I don't know) My only other annoyance with the series was the strange time jumps that would sometimes occur without warning. They seemed to cut past some important developments or just jump too far ahead too fast. All in all I felt like Atelier was much like anything created by BBC -- It's better than 90% of any American commercial crap.

Years ago there was a local PBS channel that was leased for Japanese broadcasts in its off-hours, and I saw so many great Japanese TV series. So I thought I'd check this out.

This silly show is about a young, eager woman who goes to work for a prickly lingerie fashion designer. The young woman is very passionate about textiles, and makes a number of speeches in the first episode about how wonderful some are, and the whole series portrays the creation of bras as this amazing, noble thing, and it's all rather odd.

Outside of the first meeting between the girl and her boss, who offers the wit and presence lacking from the rest of the series, there was nothing in the first episode that made me want to watch a second. It's not terrible, but it's a far cry from those series I saw in the 90s like Kagayaku Toki no Naka de or Furuhata Ninzaburō. I know there's good Japanese TV out there, but outside of anime it's hard to find.