Shows I thought were cool in 2015

It’s been too long, but I don’t really have much to say, so let’s have another list like I did two years ago. Maybe this time with some more words.

In approximate order from best to even better.

• Your Lie in April (Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso). The premise invites comparisons to Nodame Cantabile, which I think do this show a disservice — it never professes to be as mature or as musically rigorous, and holding it to that standard is rather unfair. While the dramatic turns do sometimes get predictable and circuitous, the show’s most beautiful moments make up for that. Yes, the intense swells of the score help.

• Prison School. On the flip side, this is a series that no one in their right mind would take seriously at first glance. If you can get over its unabashed attachment to the lowbrow, though, you’ll be floored by how tightly the narrative is constructed, how the characters play off each other, and how the lewd, lurid, and juvenile actually fit into a plot where everyone seems to be a chessmaster. Prison School is the sort of work that lulls you into low expectations before proceeding to ambush you with competence. Or, as I put it on Twitter, if some anime are junk food, this is Alton Brown teaching you how to deep-fry Snickers.

• Noragami Aragoto. Where the first series is overly focused on the whiny teenage rebellion of Yukine, played a bit too pitch-perfectly by Yuuki Kaji, the sequel gives us the shounen battles of wills that we waited a whole season to see. The evolving rivalry between Yato and Bishamon serves as the foundation for the rest of the show’s events, and it gives us a great sense of scale as other conflicts around them get broader and nastier. My only disappointment is with the ending theme, which isn’t quite as good as the last one. Alas, you can’t win ’em all.

• My Love Story!! (Ore Monogatari!!). It’s what love would be like if love were about being as masculine as possible while simultaneously being as shoujo as possible. This sounds clearly self-contradictory, but much like with Monthly Girls’ Nozaki’s anarchic approach to shoujo clichés, it’s why the show works. The more ridiculous moments, like the protagonist saving his girlfriend from a literal falling I-beam by just holding it up, give the romance room to breathe without suffocating on an excess of self-seriousness. At the same time, My Love Story!! never stoops to mocking its characters — it really is just love, with a good old infusion of very hot blood.

• Shirobako. It’s an anime about anime, which could have been a horrible exercise in navel-gazing, but ends up being the closest thing to genuinely fun edutainment that the medium has given us since Moyashimon. (If only the word “edutainment” didn’t sound so stupid.) We get an only-moderately-exaggerated sense of how the sausage is made, while P.A. Works gets in a sly wink and a nod about the foibles of themselves and their competitors. Seriously, did anyone not immediately think of Akiyuki Shinbou and Madoka?

• Working!!! Just as fun as the first two seasons, except things actually happen. I’d ordinarily shy away from spoilers, but come on, we all know who’s finally shacking up. The important part is that the warm, fuzzy moments come without betraying the adorably neurotic personalities of the characters we’ve come to love. Or at least laugh at in twenty-four-minute increments.

• Owarimonogatari. I’ve mentioned before that my ability to objectively evaluate the quality of any Monogatari Series installment has probably long been compromised, but this installment really does strike me as another high note, after the mildly muddled mess that is the Tsukimonogatari miniseries. Marina Inoue, mostly known for playing boisterous characters like Minami-ke’s Kana, balances out her performance as Sodachi Oikura with a remarkable vulnerability and nuance. The show’s second arc doesn’t shine quite as brightly, but still brings enough twists and turns to keep us wanting more — and, of course, that typographically-endowed flair isn’t going anywhere.

See you in 2017! You should watch Erased, because unless it totally squibs its ending, it’s going to be on this list then.

Also, I guess I lied about not having much to say.