For the most part, the show is a lighthearted comedy with some mystery elements, but occasionally it delves into some darker aspects of the entertainment industry. This is not a problem, plenty of shows do similar things well and so does OnK. Then you have that suicide episode. It's played completely straight and is deeply miserable. As someone who's been in a similar position to Akane, that episode deeply resonated and dug up some really terrible memories for me. And for a moment, the direction and cinematography was unmatched. There was no way the show was going to top that moment.
And it never did. Just one episode later everything is back to being a light hearted comedy mystery and everyone is hunky dory. The way everything resolved so instantly and how Akane's character changed completely was uncomfortable at best and insulting at worst. Everything about that episode was just swept under the rug and never brought up ever again. No one mentions the event, and Akane herself became a completely different person almost unrecognizable, and just being some bimbo after Aqua.
The is the saying that something is more than the sum of its parts, and OnK is proof that the opposite exists. That one episode is so good that everything else just pales in comparison, and its existence in the series just poisons the rest of the series as a whole. I just cannot continue to enjoy the show after that episode. The tone issues continue after that point on of course, but none so large in magnitude as that episode.
I'm left truly mixed. On one hand I enjoy the show's comedy a lot, Doga Kobo is really good with these stuff, and on another I do enjoy that one suicide episode. But as a whole these two do not and should not mix. Forcing them to be in the same show is just some baffling choice on the part of the original work and the whole show just ends up being cheap and edgy in the end as opposed to some truly meaningful retrospective.
It's like the great Mr Plinkett once said :
If they waver on the tone you don’t know what it is, and your brain starts to hurt. [...] Take “Ghostbusters”: You establish your characters. They’re witty and funny, and the audience gets that this movie’s gonna be some kinda light-hearted comedy thing with ghosts in it. There isn’t a violent rape on a pinball machine in the first ten minutes of “Ghostbusters”. Nor is there a pie-in-the-face gag in the opening of “Citizen Kane”
7/10
