Guide to AKB TV Shows – Part 1

This is a quick introduction to every AKB TV show I can think of. Description, personal opinion, 1 to 5 rating. They are ordered in the order I’d like to have seen them, if I were new to the fandom. Both doramas and TV shows are mixed, and it should be obvious in the description what every show is. I have no intention of covering every AKB show, because I haven’t seen all of them, . I’ve been saying AKB everywhere in this paragraph but all the 48 groups are included. Oh, and I’ll post it in parts because it’s getting big. Let’s start:

• AKBINGO! – The flagship AKB variety show. It’s the longest running – even if we don’t count the time way back when it was called 0ji 59fun and then 1ji 59fun, it’s still the longest. The great thing about that is, watching it, you’ll end up knowing pretty much everyone in AKB who ever had a chance at being popular. It’s too bad they still spend a lot of time with some uninteresting games when they’ve had so many good ideas already… They have the bad habit of returning to the typical idol variety combination of word games, Antonio Inoki jokes and nasty food. The best segment of all AKB shows is here – Shoujiki Shougi, the source for half of the trivia about AKB members that it seems like every fan knows. Or should. By the way, this is a segment where two members fight each other psychologically, by proposing sentences that the other must answer negatively, under the watch of a lie detector (see screenshot). For all the episodes when they do that, and a few other of my favorite segments, I’d rate them 6. But sometimes, they hardly deserve a 2. Overall, 3.

• Nemousu - THE BEST. Really, you should start here and watch it in parallel with AKBINGO!. AKBINGO! you kinda have to watch sooner rather than later, because so much of the characters are established in it. But Nemousu is the best one. This show is about putting idols in uncomfortable situations and seeing how they come out of it. But in a good way, not the stupid "let’s make them eat insects and throw pies at them". Simpler things, like having them walk into gay bars and try to appeal to the local customers and expand the AKB fandom to a new market, learn to drive airplanes (including how to communicate in English with the control tower), go up Mount Fuji, get buried alive, or organize a handshake event with farm animals. I can think of only one episode until now that was a bad and boring idea and I prefer to skip, and I’ve seen the rest multiple times. The special, 1hour+ episodes are also highly recommended. Rating 5.

• Shukan AKB – The other AKB variety show. This one is very unstable… When it’s good, it completely destroys all the competition – AKBINGO! doesn’t stand a chance. But then, sometimes it seems the producers get lazy… and it turns generic and forgettable. You have to keep watching it and wait for the gems though. Actually, now that I think about it, these days it’s on par with AKBINGO!… consistently good, but rarely special. They used to have these somewhat special episodes, where they’d do some different plan that went for two or three episodes, and later released extra DVDs. Those are AWESOME. But they haven’t done it for a while, I think a year now? Long time anyway. Honorable mention goes to the swimming pool episodes, released on DVD with such extras as a bikini fashion show and a lot of performances (see photo). By the way, the DVDs usually include more complete versions of the aired shows too, so you could get just that. Rating 3.

• Majisuka Gakuen – It’s overrated as a dorama… maybe… if you still don’t know the characters. Well, maybe you would have as much fun as I did anyway, but watching it after a fair deal of other shows, it was a lot of fun to just see how every single character and event in the dorama is somehow related to the respective idol’s image and position in the real group. The whole story is genius and deserves a separate post. I say it’s overrated because, if I was watching it with no interest in AKB at all… I’m not sure I’d care quite as much about it. It’s good, but it’s not special by itself. Q10 would be a better example of a dorama that would get me interested in the group, if I didn’t know it – although that’d be just interest in Acchan. Oh, and if anyone hasn’t heard, the dorama is about Acchan being cool and kicking everybody’s ass… meaning it has a bunch of schoolgirls fighting. That’s all you really need to know, if you’re not excited about it yet, not your thing. Rating 4.

• Bimyo~ – This is AKB’s comedy show – the answer to the old comedy sketches on Hello! Morning, if you know those… and if you do, you already know your opinion about this show. It’ll be the same. Well, almost. The big difference here is that, while H!M had permanent characters and settings, and some continuity to the stories from one episode to the next, Bimyo~ is all about short, independent sketches. There are few cases of recurring themes here, and they’re usually in the same episode. Quality is unstable, but usually good enough. No episode is all bad, but every one has something I just didn’t find funny. Rating 4.

And to close for now, here’s one of the cutest videos in human history:

AKB48 – Bimyo~