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ANNCast - A Thousand Miles

My anime watching has never been social. I've managed to talk my wife into watching maybe a dozen shows over the last nineteen years. Other than that it has always been just me the video player of the time and the TV.

Picking an underrated show for me is easy: Kaitou Joker. Even though it's on CR, everyone's basically ignored it for no good reason I can tell other than that it's a so-called "kids" series. No one reviews it, I only know one person who's blogged about it (and even then only once), and only about 2,000 MAL users have even finished watching the first season. And yet, all three seasons have been among the most consistently fun and entertaining shows that I've watched over the past few years. And "consistently" is important. When so many shows are wildly up and down in quality from episode to episode, it's nice to have one show in my lineup that I can reliably count on to deliver a satisfying new episode every week, and Joker almost always does that. No, it's not especially deep or complex - though it does have an overarching plot, and isn't just totally episodic - but I'm not watching it for complexity. I'm watching it as something I can just have fun with - 20 minutes a week to enjoy Joker's capers and adventures and have a few laughs at some of the jokes before I go on with life.

I guess I'm one of those 2000 users, but I had a very specific reason for watching the show, namely the significance of a Russian VA playing a recurring character who is neither explicitly written as nor implied to be a Russian (I guess you could still say she's vaguely implied to be foreign, but the same can be said of most of the show's main characters, none of whom are played by non-Japanese VAs). I thought it was pretty solid children's entertainment, with some jokes and occasional emotional moments that can also be appreciated by adults. I didn't watch the second season as I had a pretty busy season back when it aired, but I may get back to it at some point.