Osomatsu-san 2nd Season

I'll keep this brief, as I wrote a full review of Osomatsu-san - Season 1 which you can find on my profile.

After watching Season 1 of Osomatsu-san one gains a level of familiarity with what the anime is all about, making it easier to enjoy the stories/gags of Season 2 because one knows what they are in for.

This season of Osomatsu-san continues to provide richly creative stories/gags and a bit more insight into the minds/characters of each individual sextuplet.

The stories/gags continue to be funny and somewhat insightful. While not always laugh-out-loud funny, they can be enjoyed simply for the creativity behind the writing and voice-acting.

The ... OP and ED continue to be wonderfully creative and enjoyable, too.

Overall, I think this season deserves a consistent if not higher score than the previous season.

Osomatsu-san's second season is not offensively bad or even bad at all: I can't say it didn't manage to entertain whenever I sat down to watch it every monday. But with every new episode, it felt like something was lacking, like something from season one was lost.

To start with, the move from two or more "scenarios" per episode to episode-length "scenarios" feels like a misstep. With season one, sketches never became too tedious (outside of fan-least-favorites like F6) because of the fact that they were not the length of the entire episode. When a sketch ended, it felt like it was because the premise has ... been exhausted and the show can now move on to something else.

By having entire episodes dedicated to one sketch, some flaws that were in the writing previously become much more evident, and things become a lot more tedious. It wasn't until season 2 that I realized that whenever a joke was made about one Matsuno, a similar joke had to be made about every other brother before the show could move on. If this happened before, it became very obvious now, and if I didn't think a joke was funny once, it certainly wouldn't become funny after hearing it five more times.

Even episodes with more than one sketch had a similar feeling of tediousness, that the joke was simply going on way longer than it needed to go. The sketch involving Choromatsu and Ichimatsu had a promising premise, but at some point the one joke that the sketch, that they are uncomfortable being alone around each other, was just being repeated over and over again by the end. Maybe this aspect of the show has always been here, but if that's the case then it only got worst.

Another complaint I have is that the show at times feels like it is resting on its laurels when it comes to episode scenarios compared to season one. It often relies on interaction between the brothers to be enough for a sketch, when season one offered a lot more than that. Season one utilized the side characters very well, especially Chibita, and in this season, while he still is a great character, side characters were relegated to being vehicles for more inter-Matsuno banter and one-liners. There was no "Iyami's Counterattack" this season, no "The Karamatsu Incident", no "Jyushimatsu Festival".

If there's one thing the show does right, is that it actually manages to provide some good characterization for the sextuplets. For one thing, Karamatsu has actually become more self-assured in terms of not becoming the punching bag for the other five, often being allowed to get in his own insults and comments. But we also see his insecurity towards needing to do everything for his brothers in order to feel validation. Osomatsu is also given some much needed depth in the second to last episode, an aspect of his character that has been hinted at before but never completely explored until then, and the episode right after doesn't immediately erase all of it! These characters are very easy to turn into vapid stereotypes of their actual personalities, and there are instances where that does feel like the case, but more often than not they are consistently written with care, or at least as much care an irreverent sketch comedy show could have.

That's what keeps the show watchable for me: it still cares. Episodes like "Iyami in the Wind" and the two final episodes show that despite how flippant, bitter, and absurd the show is at times, there is something very genuine at the center of it, keeping the tradition of the 1988 series alive (and perhaps the writing of the original manga as well, although I have not read any of it so I cannot say for sure). Maybe the writing quality has been worsening, but I can tell that no one has given up, which gives me hope that if there is a third season, perhaps the writing staff could fix their flaws and create something as good as what I remember season one being.

I'm not quite sure what the hell the writers were thinking, but this season is a major disappointment. With less focus on any kind of set up or punchline the humour almost entirely consists of gross-out humour, lol funny random humour or just downright tedious, drawn out jokes that quickly overstay their welcome. What should last 15 seconds at most can last up to 2 minutes at times and honestly some scenes feel like they're drawn out to half the episode length because they either ran out of ideas or just got lazy. This is not what I watched the show for. The first season ... did have its moments of gross or dirty humour, but it was never done in such an over the top, obnoxious way. There's also all these weird skits with the brothers in different eras or fictional scenarios which I just can't stand. The joke is almost always ''haha look, the dumb Osomatsu brothers are in _____ era, isn't that funny guys?'' but there's no real joke behind any of it. Really disappointed as the first season was good enough to be one of my favourite anime seasons ever, and it really could get me laughing at times. Don't get me wrong, Season 1 was pretty dumb too but at least the jokes were funny. I think I chuckled, once, at this one. Honestly, if you value your time, just skip this season it isn't worth it.