No, I don't blame you for missing The Little Lies We All Tell. I will, however, inform you that you missed out on one of the most consistently funny, occasionally surprising comedies of the season.

The story (or lack thereof) stems from the basic philosophy behind any sitcom: take a group of weirdos with big personalities, toss them together, and watch how things play out. Maybe add a gimmick to set yourself apart, and the weirder the gimmick, the higher the risk/reward. Lean too hard on that quirk, and you've got a single-joke series that becomes played out within a few episodes. Shy away, and you've thrown away comedic potential. The Little Lies We All Tell takes a maximalist approach by giving each member of the primary cast their own quirk of varying levels of surrealism, from a boy in disguise at an all-girls' school, to a girly girl who escaped ninja training, to a psychic who can only read girls' minds, to an alien colonel using mind control to conceal her identity.

Doubtless, part of the reason the show failed to grab much of an audience was that there wasn't much originality in the basic premise. Boy at a girls' school? Been there, done that, usually with a number of tasteless "fox in the henhouse" jokes. Female ninja fleeing her clan so that she can live the life of an ordinary girl? That goes as far back as Ranma ½. Plus, the Colonel was putting on a distinctly childish performance as Rikka, which felt like it could open too much up to lolicon humor. But then, the first episode has a period joke that was actually funny, a true unicorn in the world of situational comedy. So, I decided to stick around.

I don't know whether to credit the original manga author Madoka Kashihara or series composer Megumi Shimizu. Still, the script seemed consistently aware of the most obvious jokes and remained determined to sidestep them throughout. As a result, there's an almost subversive undertone to much of the humor. Sure, Rikka, who looks closer to eight years old than a teenager, attracts some unsavory attention from men, but those men are nearly always the butt of the joke. Sekine is a bit frumpy and doesn't get the special treatment that the others do, but the humor of that isn't at her expense; rather, it's about how a situation like that makes everyone else super uncomfortable, and since they're not "normal girls," their awkward attempts to comfort her get downright surreal.

This is not to say that the humor is always gentle or kind; K-ON!-style iyashikei this ain't. Nor is it mean-spirited or based in gross-out humor like Asobi Asobase... not that there's anything wrong with any of these. However, what makes Little Lies stand out so much is just how balanced it is, portraying a group of weirdos who genuinely care about each other, even as they try to keep their secrets concealed without ever getting saccharine about "the power of friendship" or other empty niceties. That combination of sweetness and acid keeps things fresh since you're never quite sure which direction a gag will take, and jokes are likelier to stay laugh-out-loud funny if they surprise you.

The Little Lies We All Tell wasn't the most remarkable series of Fall 2022, but I found it to be the one I watched most consistently. Every week, I could look forward to coming home from a challenging day at work, kicking off my shoes, and enjoying an episode I knew would make me laugh without the well-worn anime tropes that frustrate me or ask me to think too hard. Sometimes, that's all you want or need.