Obviously, this series exists because someone behind it is passionate about motor racing. If you want to see some car racing... go watch actual cаr racing competitions. Stories about sports can’t just be about sports, they have to be actual stories to justify their existence. There are multiple ways to achieve that. It can be Cute Girls Doing Sports. It can be sports-themed battle shounen about Friendship, Effort, Victory. It can be over-the-top camp where the fate of the universe is decided by a match of children’s card game. The way Overtake! chooses to go about it is human drama about people involved with car racing. And the drama writing of this show is a failure. In a rather unique way, too – every character is a sociopath, but the story has no self-awareness about this and doesn’t consistently write them as sociopaths. It’s the lack of self-awareness and consistency that is the actual problem, I can’t care about characters whose actions and motivations are lolrandom without being meant as such.
Examples:
One of the two protagonists is a photojournalist. His backstory (revealed in the first episode in a decent showing of indirect storytelling) is that he published a photo of people dying in front of him, got canceled on Twitter for it, and now has PTSD over it, literally shaking and sweating if he as much as points a camera at a person. And this is gibberish. It looks fine if you don’t think about it because all the individual parts make sense on their own, but altogether it’s bullshit.
First, the character didn’t get traumatized by someone dying in front of his eyes. He only got traumatized by people disapproving of the photo on social media. So he’s a sociopath (go watch the Nightcrawler movie, it’s exactly about this premise). I mean, I get what they were going for - publishing an insensitive photo was a shameful display, making the entire profession of photojournalism lose face, so he atoned by committing honorable [career] sudoku via not taking photos of people anymore. He’s still a sociopath who only cares whether the public thinks he did something wrong rather than whether he actually did something wrong.
The real issue is the wanton and tasteless tacking of PTSD onto this mess. PTSD isn’t a magic wand that generates free drama for scriptwriters. It’s an actual thing that happens to actual people. If the character couldn’t film people because he was haunted by the dead he saw through a lens that one time, that would make sense. If he couldn’t use social media because he was haunted by people telling him to KYS there, it would also make sense. Cyber-bullying PTSD triggered by an act of filming people does not make sense. It’s not how it works. It’s bullshit. Just don’t make it PTSD, there is no reason why it can’t just be the guy doesn’t want to film people anymore because he had fucked up by filming people. PTSD here is a frivolous attempt to get free drama points.
Another character is the previous guy’s ex-wife/editor-in-chief. The guy fell apart due to that canceling incident, and that’s why she left him. Over the course of the show, the protagonist gets his groove back, and she seemingly starts falling for him again. So, she divorced the guy when he was at his lowest and needed support, and wants to get him back now he’s successful again. Yeah, she’s a sociopath. And once again, this is not the issue, the issue is that after the divorce she maintained the same emotionally, physically, and professionally close relationship with him. Basically, she didn’t actually divorce him. What is even the point? It’s like the authors wanted the get back together with an ex-wife plot, but didn’t have the balls to have the ex-wife be antagonistic to the main character at any point, lest the audience would deem her evil.
The second male protagonist is a racer, his subplot is a generic “dead parent’s footsteps” cliche. This is not about him, it’s about his rival/foil character from a different team. That rival crashed into the protagonist during try-out races, tanking his career prospects, it was entirely his own fault, yet he can’t stop seething at the protagonist, blaming him for it. For the third time, this guy is a sociopath. And for the third time, this is not the issue, the issue is that he isn’t written like one and doesn’t act like one in other situations. It’s like watching some kind grandma from a slice-of-life show start screaming about Jewish conspiracies, it’s bafflingly out-of-character.
Even the minor side characters can’t stop being sociopaths for at least 5 minutes. Like a “playboy” whose entire shtick is a passive-aggressive assertion of how much better than everyone he is, or an advertiser who is like, “Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t take this job, so I tricked you to come here under a false pretense, and I already paid your boss, so you have to do it.”
4/10 for “this show belongs in DSM-5 or something.”
