Massage Tantei Joe

Yabukihara Joe is a masseur who's afflicted with a debilitating introversion. He literally can't look someone in the eye while talking to them, to the point that he practices eye contact with a massage training dummy - which also makes him nervous. But when he commits to doing a massage and focuses, that fear leaves him completely. He gives massages that leave his customers in a state of bliss and which give him uncanny insight into what those customers have been doing and even thinking.

Naturally there's a huge suspension-of-disbelief required of the viewer, but it's easy to play along with the premise, and the show is funny and entertaining. The reason I had to dock it points is that it's too silly for its own good. A lot of overly-silly dramas are overly-silly because they were based on comedy manga and the producers tried to match the manga's over-the-top humor in the drama - but as far as I can tell, "Massage Tantei Joe" wasn't based on a manga. So maybe the producers were trying to create that kind of vibe with the source screenplay?

Whatever the case, the silliness factor gets so over-the-top at times that you as an audience member have a hard time taking anything about it seriously. Additionally, there's a late episode in which a corrupt manager's ethics breach is completely glossed-over as A-OK.

She's the protagonist's former superior who, at his previous engineering job, basically got him fired via blaming him for her own mistake. Joe encounters her again in the midst of his massage career, and just sweeps her ethical rottenness under the rug. It makes him appear capricious and dismissive of ethical essentials. But then, the Joe character is not a particularly strong one anyway.

The clownish pair of policemen who continually enlist his help in solving cases are motivated by a respect for justice, but Joe never shows any such motive. He's always reluctant to do anything until he's literally dragged along, and until he does his "concentrate" transformation and gets serious about his work, he's a quivering mass of indecision and confusion. It contributes a little to the series' comedy, but it strips the Joe character of anything admirable, and leaves him - and the series itself - as shallow and a little two-dimensional.

It's ok for entertainment, but don't watch this expecting anything deeper in terms of theme or character development, or even engaging drama. It's strictly screwball comedy.

Currently available (April 2018) on Amazon Prime.