What’s it about ?
Twelve young idol wannabes learning the job at their production company. (It’s an adaptation of a series of simulation games where you’re the producer and have to build them into proper stars.)
Characters
I’m not going to go into much detail about each idol : there’s the girl-next-door, the super-timid one, the annoying twins, the hick who loves animals, the trust-fund-kid who’s in it to get adored, the troll, the serious one who just wants to sing, the sleepy one…
We also see a bit of the production staff… and of course one of them’s an ex-idol.
In this episode, a new producer is put in charge of grooming them up to stardom… but he spends most of the episode pretending to be a cameraman filming a documentary on them (he’s actually trying to get to know them better, without them sucking up to him too much).
Production Values
Very average. Most of the episode uses the framing device of being some sort of documentary/realTV show… with a lot of “candid” moments that actually feel horribly manufactured, like all realTV to me. Also, for some bizarre reason the “cameraman” ‘s questions are shown only in subtitles (as if this were a game)… despite producer guy getting proper dialogue at the end. It’s quite baffling.
Overall Impression
Wow, this is terrible. The approach of developing all the characters at once is very unwieldy and the realTV framing device feels horribly artificial. None of the girls rise above their archetypes, and all told it’s a very boring watch.
If anything, this has made me slightly interested in the actual games (I like simulation games, and this sounds as good a concept as any other). But watching a full TV series of this, without any player interaction ? Get out !
