Criminally neglected: The TV Drama!

I have been waiting for many a year for someone to make a serious stab at bringing some live action TV shows out in R1. Mainly because I seriously can't afford R2 prices. At least, not without subtitles. I can justify dropping $200 on one of these, but not if I can't show it to friends.

When you get right down to it, all the really good TV shows (fucked aberrations like Love Complex aside) comes down to two men: Tsutsumi Yukihiko and Kudo Kankuro.

Tsutsumi Yukihiko is a journeyman director, which means between flashes of genius he regularly churned out complete crap on a regular basis. The last year or so have seen him churning out an amazing number of movies, and his live action film based on 20th Century Boys may finally get him the international attention he deserves. Over the course of three seminal TV series, he developed a very unusual filmic language. It ignores a lot of rules directors have developed to make sure the audience can follow the action, but somehow he actually makes it easier to follow. Off-kilter camera angles, with the faces in the lower corners and nothing in the rest of the screen, rabid fire cutting during exposition that somehow manages to focus attention on the salient details instead of merely distract, and a love of abrupt tonal shifts.

Meanwhile, Kudo Kankuro is an award winning prolific screenwriter, having written half a dozen TV series and movies, acted in bunch of other projects, directed a movie, and he also plays guitar in the comedy punk band Group Tamashii.

• Ikebukuro West Gate Park

They started out together, with a show so popular and influential it not only made both their careers, but the gang activity in the show was imitated so widely the police forbade them from making a sequel. The (bad) eventually TV movie had to compromise but putting the gang characters in charge of competing ramen shops.

Based on a series of novels by Ishida Ira about a street level detective, a guy who just happens to know enough people around town that he can find out just about anything. Kudo mines the novels for everything good, and then weaves in another layer of distinctive flavor on top, making this one of the few adaptations that surpasses the original. Featuring Watanabe Ken as the chief of police and Kubozuka Yousuke in the break out role that, along with the Kudo scripted movies Go and Ping Pong, helped make him a star.

Tsutsumi's direction is significantly less stylized than his later work, aiming for an unobtrusive documentary feel (though there are a number of impressive flourishes when the script allows it.)

Kudo Kankuro

• Kisarazu Cat's Eye

When he started creating his own shows, Kudo tends towards the manic comedy. They can be a little exhausting, honestly. This show, about the misadventures of a group of small town friends, is mainly impressive for the structural gimmick of rewinding the episode halfway through to catch up on a B-plot half glimpsed in the background through the rest of the episode.

• Manhattan Love Story

Likewise, love stories about a group of forty somethings that revolve around a coffee shop, the stoic owner of which rips off his mustache and flies into action to save the day near the end of each episode.

• Boku no Mahoutsukai

Impossible dumb show about the world's most obnoxiously in love couple. When her brain starts switching with that of a famous memory expert, even more wackiness ensues.

All three of these shows are very funny, but I'd like to see him add a more dramatic edge into his next project. Of course, he's already done several more TV shows since, but since I no longer live in Japan, I haven't seen them.

Tsutsumi Yukihiko

• Keizoku

This is where Tsutsumi's distinctive style originated. Nakatani Miki and Watabe Atsuro play police detectives investigating cold cases - mysteries that were never solved. The distinctive comedic rhythms established here carry over into his next and greatest work, but an ambitious and misguided attempt at some sort of body swapping hypnosis killer ends up ruining the ending. Good the shows was successful enough to spawn a very good movie.

• Trick

The holy fucking grail as far as I'm concerned, a hugely successful cult hit that got two further seasons, a feature length direct to video movie, and two theatrical films, and made stars out of Nakama Yukie and Abe Hiroshi (which seems to have ensured that Nakama Yukie will only be allowed to be in bland big budget mainstream things, sadly.)

The two of them have a wicked chemistry, which the writers quickly pick up on, pushing the show in strange and strange directions. What starts as a quirky mystery/comedy with horror elements gradually morphs into an elaborate parody of the Jhorror style, with characters that make the camera shake whenever they're on screen and dramatic catch phrases flung out in a fit of stylized frenzy.

Nakama Yukie plays an unsuccessful magician who ends up working for a gullible, conceited university professor, helping him disprove claims of psychic abilities. While he instantly believes everything, she dramatically pretends to know exactly what is going on while desperately trying to actually reverse engineer whatever magic they've seen into a trick she can reproduce or explain.

Man, I love this show so much I can't even write about it coherently.