It starts off well enough. It has a really nice OP to pump you up for the antics to come. Fukuhara Kaori is back in the fold voicing a character much like her Tsukasa from Lucky Star. Kotobuki Minako of K-ON! fame is here too. They've even got Madoka. This is a nice cast lineup. Four girls in a high school slice of life with a cast like this, can it seriously go wrong?
The major falling of A-Channel is that it isn't funny. It isn't a slice of life with a gimmick, so you can't latch onto one. Most of it isn't moe, so you can't just D'AWWW at it. This is an Azumanga Daioh, where the characters are the driving point and the *only* driving point and they need to play off each other. When all of your characters save one are this uninteresting and simple, that leads to some serious problems.
You have Run, who's ditzy and spaced out. You have Nagi, who's literally an inferior Yomi from AzuDai. You have Yuuko, who gets scared easily and has big boobs. You have Tooru, who's shy but aggressive.
For each of those characters save Tooru that's all there is to them. Tooru gets a little bit more to her in that she really likes Run, she has this conflict where Run and the others are a year older than her, and she's moe. And she's the most interesting character in this show.
Ugh.
This wouldn't even be so bad if the show was actually funny. But it isn't. It makes some awful attempts at comedy every now and then but they all fall flat. Oh, Yuuko has big boobs so Tooru flips them up for some reason. Oh, Nagi's qq'ing about her weight. Oh, Run's talking to guys so Tooru's coming to scare them off.
Hilarious.
The show couldn't stop there though. Bad characters and no comedy? They had to take it one step further. On top of that, they force insert songs into every episode. EVERY. SINGLE. EPISODE. And each time except literally once, in one of the later episodes, it's shoe-horned in so jarringly that it just feels completely out of place. And awful. With lazy animation. Most of the time it's just the music played to stills.
The best that can be said of this show is that some of the music is ok, the OP is good, and the characters at least look nice.
A-Channel is awful.
