Kaseifu no Mita

Kaseifu no Mita (a.k.a. "I'm Mita: Your Housekeeper" on Crunchyroll,) was interesting enough to keep me watching to the bitter end, but that's about the most you can say for it.

The acting was excellent by everybody of course, even the kids, but I kept wondering about this series' writers: What kind of person sits down and actually dreams up such a relentless downer?

The main character, the deeply traumatized Mita Akari, is a morose, expressionless, robotic automaton throughout; the family's father Asuda Keiichi, is one of the most disgusting, pathetic and spineless characters ever written for the screen; his sister-in-law, Yuki Urara, is written as such a ditzy, clumsy airhead that it's impossible to admire her even though you want to. This is no slam on the actors - they each did a spectacular job of playing these characters, to the point you had to remind yourself it's a TV show. The problem is that the writers decided to present a weird fusion of Twilight Zone and depravity-study.

By the middle of this I started thinking how much stronger a story it could have been if Mita had been more believable - IOW, still unsmiling and morose, but not that bizarre robot who's willing to do anything, even kill, if told to do so. If the Keiichi character had not been presented as such a corrupt worm, and if the Urara character had been loopy but not a complete ditz, the story would've had more depth of believability and of dramatic impact. Instead, it was impossible to care about any of these people except for the kids, who were the only admirable people in this story and the only characters who occasionally displayed heroism.

[Spoiler alert: Stop reading if you haven't yet watched it...]

Even in the final episode, where Mita experiences a long-awaited change of heart, it's... barely. In the scene at the table where she finally gives each of them her smile, she's still robotic - just a robot that now smiles. And the lengthy speeches by each of the kids and the father should take a prize for sappy contrivance. To the writers I'd say: "There is such a thing as too much of a good thing." Not that it helps much in any case.

Last, the final episode left almost everything up in the air. Will Mita ever snap out of her self-imposed pathology? We'll never know. Is Keiichi going to marry Urara? We'll never know. Unless of course...

Maybe the writers did that on purpose, to leave open the possibility of a second season. But given the depressing slog that this was, I can't imagine anyone wanting to see a continuation of it, despite the good acting.

Not recommended - unless you're really, really bored and in a really morbid mood.