英語か日本語のどっちで話すか迷っていましたが、ちょっとした文化交流のためにI think it would be best to try to say it in English.

I've been watching television dramas lately for leisure. I tend to be cautious about saying what I like and dislike because I think a lot of art has strong merit and how I respond to it can become very personal, and it applies here very strongly... where "bad art" that I know many people wouldn't enjoy very much tends to be much more meaningful to me than a lot of what is considered great.

The other day, I finished reading the script to a drama by Okada Yoshikazu called まだ恋は始まらない (Mada koi wa hajimaranai lit. Love Still Hasn't Begun) aired in 1995 on Fuji TV in the famous "Getsuku" time slot. I was always very curious about this one since it was made in my favorite era for dramas, was written by a screenwriter whose work I enjoy, and features actors who I love and recognize. I really enjoyed reading it. It was a lot of fun imagining what the drama had actually looked like in my head as I read through it intently. But there is something about it that is worth mentioning... it's that I don't think you're likely to like it.

The conclusion of the story is revealed to you from the very beginning. The conflicts the characters will go through will have resolutions that you can easily imagine from the very beginning. The human issues the show deals with are not particularly heavy and the philosophy of the show seems naive. None of these things I've listed ruin the show for me. Tokiwa Takako has a line in the show about how love is something like that, something that shows up with no rhyme or reason. It may not be actually true as we experience life, but it's only almost true in the magical world Okada creates, where fate is a nearly physical bond between two people. It’s so physical in the show that it supersedes even how people who believe in fated love imagine fated love—only the two main characters ever have quite the right understanding of it!

I'm not one to be particularly bothered by spoilers. I like to watch things blind, but I don't mind it if something about the plot is spoiled to me. If it's a good show, some knowledge I have in advance about what "happens" in it shouldn't matter very much to me. How a story is constructed matters much more to me, and what way is there to see that but to watch the show itself? Plot spoilers are the most infamous kind of spoiler, but what about setting spoilers? Character spoilers? Lighting spoilers, music spoilers? I think these kinds of spoilers tend to be more invitational more than anything: of course I want to watch the drama that uses this song I love! I see plot spoilers as roughly the same kind of thing. This drama happens to show its cards from the very beginning, but what do I know about how the game reaches its conclusion?

If it weren't for melodrama, we wouldn't see how a young and sharp female lawyer succumbs to a ditzy love fever. Or how an innocent subordinate approaches love with his senior. Or how a young sibling in impossible love struggles with fate. Or how a divorced man overcomes his fate as a divorced man. The characters are all exaggerated, over-the-top and certainly self-serious, but when in all this did that ever become... bad? When I watch Guiding Light, I don't care that I know who loves who, who cheated on who, who just moved in from where, but on the story between it all. Isn't melodrama where simple lines can turn into something so much more complex on the screen?

The drama あすなろ白書 (Asunaro hakusho lit. The Asunaro White Papers) from 1993 is another "Getsuku" classic that I adore. I'm enraptured by every scene—how Saimon Fumi (and screenplay adapter Kitagawa Eriko) could make such a complicated web of relationships between just five people is so incredible to me. You, too, may appreciate it if you have a capacity for melodrama. Screenwriters like Nojima Shinji like to tell us lessons about our own human lives through exaggerating everything you see on screen. How could you tone down 未成年 (Miseinen) or 家なき子 (Ie naki ko)? There's a reason why 愛しあってるかい! (Aishiatterukai!) is so silly and crazy, and why we're laughing along with the cast in the bloopers.

Melodrama is memorable and evocative. Maybe you won't see yourself on screen and maybe you won't know the characters in real life, but I think there's a newer tendency in television for the audience to look for people to relate to and understand. I think traditionally this was substituted with more emphasis on the philosophy of the show, where we would take away meaning from how everything was positioned rather than who we're dealing with. I wonder if this traditional way of doing it was based on creating wider appeal to an audience?

I think it is often overplayed how self-awareness breaks through the cheesiness of melodrama. Twin Peaks has a lot of melodrama, and I think it works because its charm comes from being so over-the-top crazy. "Playing into it" doesn't really necessitate self-awareness, and I don't derive any enjoyment out of Twin Peaks knowing that it's self-aware. I really think it's just because everything is so dramatic that it works… because, of course, there's nothing wrong with melodrama itself. There is good and bad melodrama. I don't find watching Lifetime movies to be particularly enjoyable, but it's because there isn't much to them.

I think what people see as bad in melodrama is not the heightened emotion, but the disconnect between how the audience perceives a scene is intended to feel and how it really feels. This can be anywhere. It exists even in the underlying logic and plot of the show—if things aren't fitting together for you, it won't work. I think it's more noticeable with melodrama, but the way I see it, it only makes me appreciate it more. Making melodrama work isn't easy!