Call Center no Koibito eps 1-6

I was really looking forward to this. After the amateurish Zeni Geba, I was hoping to see Mimura in a good jdorama. Call Center no Koibito takes place in a call center for a daytime shopping show and is about the small group of people who handle customer complaints. Koizumi Kotaro is the generic selfish main character, Tokura who is demoted to this customer complaints department and his job is basically to take the views through the story. On a side note, I just noticed that he is the son of the ex-Japanese Prime Minister.


Mimura plays Aoyama Kyoko, an enigmatic worker who has some sort of history with the host of the shopping program, Nankyoku Aisu. She is sort of the GTO character. She's suppose to stand out and to be the opposite of Tokura. Unfortunately in 6 episodes, nothing has really happened to her character wise and she is getting stale. In fact, Tokura's I'll be selfish in the beginning and do the right thing at the end has been repeated too many times. In order words, there's been hardly any main story development. Its nice to see Mimura not play her usual nice but naive character but Aoyama Kyoko doesn't stand out much. The only difference between her and the others is that she sleeps there at night and is kind of obsessive about helping the callers.


It would be ok if the individual stories were good but they range from passable to plain boring. Someone calls the call center to complain, Tokura and co look up their buying history and solve something at the end. Its watchable but they are just playing too safe with the simple feel good stories. The other characters do get a bit of background story but they are never the emphasis and it just feels throwaway. Usually with job doramas, its the best way to go. Make the characters more rounded and the viewers will be more interested to see what happens to them.


The most interesting person in this show turn out to be the host, Nankyoku Aisu. At first she seems like this domineering diva who doesn't care but throughout the six episodes, she has shown glimpses that she isn't all that bad. Or maybe its just that the people around her are worse. I enjoy the power struggle between her and her colleagues. You get the idea that its a truly cutthroat industry and only the strong and ass-kissers survive. The politics of running a daytime shopping program are much more interesting than generic feel good customer complaints.


The first 6 episodes have been sort of watchable but very bland. The only reason I would continue watching is just to see how the ending comes to be because we see a glimpse of it in the beginning. Its a shame that there's been hardly any build up towards it.