The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Pardon the Intrusion, I'm Home!

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Rinko is a 24-year-old office worker and closeted otaku who lives alone in an apartment complex. Despite her busy work life, she finds time to unwind by reading her favorite manga, Usaneko-bu, and watching anime. But every time she watches anime, her neighbor to her right violently bangs on the wall, asking Rinko to quiet down. Rinko asks her gentleman neighbor to her left, Akito Satsuki, to speak to her right-side neighbor through the wall. But the right-side neighbor ends up kicking the wall down. Rinko gets surprised when she finds out that her right-side neighbor is actually the creator of her favorite manga, Haruma Usada. Haruma also kicks through Satsuki's wall, and a weird new kind of "room sharing" begins among the three neighbors.

Pardon the Intrusion, I’m Home! is based on the manga series by Watomura. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Rinko, sweetheart, here's a bit of free advice for you: if your neighbor is refusing to let you live your life or if they break down the wall between your apartments and then start making demands of you, it doesn't matter if they're the creator of your favorite book. You call the police.

Of course, if Rinko did that, there wouldn't be much of a story, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. I've complained elsewhere in this preview guide about TSTL heroines, and I'm sorry to say that Rinko fits that bill at the moment: she has zero sense of self-preservation and a terrible case of hero worship. I can understand why she didn't stand up for herself at work when her boss suddenly dumped more overtime on her because he's in a position of power over her. But Usada, her manga-creating neighbor, is simply acting like a jerk. She was ready to do something about it, with the help of her other attractive neighbor, Satsuki, until she saw who he was. This is plot-mandated stupidity.

It's also something I could more easily overlook if not for a couple of factors. One is, of course, how much of a doormat Rinko is, but the other is the fact that both men just ignore what she wants. Satsuki, who at first appears to be a better choice (assuming love triangle) than Usada, is really just as bad as the other man at ignoring what Rinko wants. Witness how he digs in on the whole “I'll pretend to be your boyfriend” thing when Usada mentions it. If Usada heard them through the door before, he likely knows that this is an act. But Satsuki is unwilling to call it any such thing. Rinko thinks it's because he's still trying to protect her, but between that and his little trick of sitting closer than he knows she's comfortable with, the story tells a different one. He also may have flat-out lied to her about being a fellow otaku, although perhaps he's an otaku for tasteful black-and-white décor. This poor woman is trapped between two jerks, and she's barely aware of it.

How much you enjoy this episode is largely going to hinge on how annoying you find the characters and how the humor strikes you, because visually, it's quite nice. The men are handsome in totally different ways, Rinko's clothes are adorable, and the change in style between the show proper and the in-world anime Rinko watches is very well done. It obviously didn't work for me, but fans of silly humor and with a higher tolerance for bafflingly poor choices than I have should give it a chance.

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James Beckett
Rating:
Rinko sure is a relatable heroine, isn't she? Here she is, just trying to scrape by and make a living in this dog-eat-dog world, and all she wants to do after a long day at the nine-to-five grind is settle in and watch some anime. On top of that, her hot yet terribly inconsiderate neighbor, who just kicked a hole straight through the drywall separating their apartments, just so happens to be the author of her favorite manga. There's also another hot guy living in the other neighboring apartment that has roped her into some kind of elaborate pretend-we're-dating- except-we're-pretty-much-dating-for-real scheme, and the manga author kicked a hole in this guy's wall, too. So, now Rinko the Hapless Otaku has been thrust into a wacky sitcom throuple scenario with a petulant man-child and a possible sociopath! That's…that's also a universally relatable experience, right?

There's a lot to like about Pardon the Intrusion, I’m Home!, and there's equally as much to raise an eyebrow over. Most of the issues come down to the execution of the show not living up to its premise's…Well, I was going to say “potential,” but the frankly bizarre and contrived setup is probably what doomed this series to its niche appeal in the first place. As I said, Rinko is a relatable rom-com protagonist, and the show's bright, appealing art goes out of its way to give her plenty of funny reaction faces and humanizing moments. In any standard rom-com, she would make for an excellent lead. Here, though, her charming characteristics are weighed down by the neurotic tendencies and anime obsessions that just don't play as particularly funny or interesting, and that's before we get into the problem of her co-stars. A lot of the show simply isn't very funny, to tell the truth. Something about the script and the episode's comedic timing causes otherwise funny jokes to fall flat.

I blame the boys, myself. Haruma, at least, is supposed to suck, at least in that “He's a dick, but I can fix him!” sort of way. That doesn't make his attitude any less obnoxious, though, and he doesn't have the looks or the chemistry with Rinko to be carried on sex appeal alone. Then there's Akito, whom I genuinely just do not understand. His whole deal seems to be that he's the kind of super-organized and vaguely intimidating man who could sweep a girl like Rinko off her feet and dazzle her with his force of will. As I alluded to earlier, though, his whole routine feels less like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman and more like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. He doesn't have any chemistry with Rinko, either, since every scene he shares with the girl just makes him look like a child molester.

So, yeah, I unfortunately can't recommend Pardon the Intrusion, I’m Home! As anything other than a morbid curiosity. Maybe you will dig it more than I, but I suspect that this is one of those also-ran rom-coms that will vanish from our collective memory in a short time. Hopefully, once these guys are out of Rinko's life, the girl will be able to watch some damned anime in peace.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:
I can't shake the feeling that I should probably be giving Pardon the Intrusion, I’m Home! a lower rating. After all, Usada sucks ass. Satsuki is absolutely correct that he's showing signs of being a domestic abuser: he's destructive enough to kick a hole in Rinko's door. He's controlling enough and possessive enough that he gets mad about a woman he doesn't even know watching an anime other than the one based on his manga. He's entitled enough to come stomping into that woman's apartment through the hole in her wall that he made and demand that she feed him.

And he gets away with it all because he makes a popular manga, and Rinko worries that if he were to face consequences, it would mean the discontinuation of her favorite series. None of the jokes land because Usada is utterly odious; I don't want to laugh at him. Rinko, meanwhile, just… takes it. She treats it like an honor because he's THE Usahara, as opposed to it ruining her favorite series. I'm not criticizing the series because this kind of abuse of power is as common as dirt in the creative industries, but it's frustrating to watch!

That frustration keeps it from realizing its full potential as what could easily be a nice, comforting little series. The reason my rating is as high as it is, is because, to be honest, I had a really hard day at work. Watching Rinko curl up to decompress with some anime, only to be harshly interrupted by a jackass, hit me hard, as did the way her stress spilled over the moment Satsuki showed her the slightest bit of kindness. I appreciated Satsuki's insistence on sticking up for her, even if he's definitely milking the “pretend boyfriend” thing way too much.

I'm also hungry, and Rinko's cooking looked incredible. Turns out, this isn't just a romantic comedy; it's also a cooking anime! The effort is such that the individual grains of rice are drawn as she stirs in the egg, and I could practically taste the richness of the yolk as it intermingles with the white grains. The animators clearly saved all the effort and skill for that scene; the rest of the show looks kind of ass, stiff, and already off-model even though it's only the first episode. Rinko's still cute, but it's hard to buy the men as handsome enough to work as josei protagonists when they look like that.