The Reluctant Preacher

Well-acted but stupid

It's a high school drama with an idiot plot that's not entirely redeemed by some good to excellent performances.

Hirose Alice takes the lead as Urumi-sensei who is starting work at a large private school after a long break in her career. As usual, she hits the emotional beats well, playing here a person who is recovering from an incident in her past. Urumi is insightful, blunt but self-aware, and so is constantly biting her tongue until various episodic denouements make her write a speech and speak her mind. The fact that her character almost works is a testament to Hirose's charisma and ability as an actor.

Two of actresses playing students in her class do particularly good jobs conveying nuanced performances of the kind of emotional entanglements that can happen in high school in particular. Seino Asahi is pretty new to television but is excellent here as Hina, the popular mean-girl in the the classroom who is almost completely unaware of how she is treating the others. And her main victim, Iroha, is played by the much more veteran Toyoshima Hana who is really blooming as an actress and is showing good range across her many recent roles.

On the other end of the spectrum, the series features two of the most scenery-chewing villain performances I've seen in years in Ito Atsushi as Moriguchi-sensei and Hagiwara Mamoru as Haruki. I've seen Ito in several other things in which he has done a good, solid, professional acting job, and so I must assume he was acting as directed here and so any blame for his and Hagiwara's OTT performances must directed at the two directors with Uchida Hidemi in particular having helmed the wretched episodes 7 and 10. Ironically, Ito played the nominal lead in 2007's Watashitachi no Kyokasho (Our Textbook) in which he played a parallel role to that of Urumi-sensei here in a far superior drama that covers many of the same issues in a private high school setting.

The writing is pretty bad throughout with the banal themes of "bullying bad" and "over-adherence to hierarchy and collectivism bad" being blared in every episode. As noted above, episode 7 is particularly awful where the script goes full Rashomon for an incredibly stupid set of soap-tastic reveals that are otherwise entirely irrelevant to the series as whole but also results in the same stupid scene being played out at least three times.

There are good jdramas covering this territory in novel and interesting ways. Off the top of my head: Watashitachi no Kyokasho (2007), 3 Nen A Gumi: Ima kara Mina-san wa, Hitojichi Desu (2019) and Saiko no Kyoshi: Ichinengo, Watashi wa Seito ni Sareta (2023). Go watch those instead.

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