Hanayome wa Yakudoshi

[Excerpt from Daily Yomiuri, July 14, Wm. Penn, Televiews]: Thursday: Hanayome wa Yakudoshi (10 p.m., TBS network) Ryoko Shinohara is a competent actress who can usually make almost any drama palatable, but not this one.

The premise is that a competent woman journalist of 32 (her yakudoshi, an unlucky year for women) has lost her anchor chair to the ditzy weather girl. Her only chance to stay on at the network involves appearing in a variety show that spotlights a sophisticated city woman experiencing country life as the bride-to-be of a farm family's oldest son. As Japanese dramas go, this scenario could have worked. But instead of sending her off to a prearranged destination, she is given the daunting chore of finding her own farm. In the requisite "gokon" scene, she runs into an old college boyfriend, remembers his family runs a peach orchard in Fukushima Prefecture and gets him to write to his family that she is coming.

Then the variety show director tells her to go off alone and not reveal she is from a TV show. But how can one film a variety show about life in the countryside without a camera crew? Just one of the little illogical miscues in this drama. The second is the portrayal of the family as only barely functional, with a stereotypical overpowering matriarch, two frustrated siblings, a lecherous uncle, a gossipy aunt, and a spooky cousin who wants to take over the orchard and wears a sunbonnet that makes her look like a witch. Another starless night.

STARRING: Shinohara Ryoko
NETWORK: TBS
Theme Song:  
DURATION: July through September 2006