TELEVIEWS / New romance jumps on the telemarketing bandwagon

Wm. Penn / Daily Yomiuri Columnist

Renai NEET: Wasureta Koi no Hajimekata (Love NEET: How to start falling in love again, Fridays, 10 p.m., TBS) is a creative combination of drama and telemarketing.

It's the story of six romance-shy thirty-somethings who yearn for commitment and true love. They just have no idea how to find it. Their love lives are going nowhere fast, as signified by the title's acronym. NEET means: not in employment, education or training.

The series reminds me vaguely of the 1986 TBS drama Danjo Shichinin Natsu Monogatari--minus one cast member and most of the dynamism of that hit series, which led to the real-life marriage of its stars Akashiya Sanma and Shinobu Otake.

This story opens with Rin (Yukie Nakama) and Nanako (Ryo), a career woman who owns a condo, attending the "rikon-shiki" of their friend Miho (Mikako Ichikawa). This is a divorce party where the couple smash their wedding rings and announce: We will now live happily ever after separately. The reason given for the breakup is her husband's cat allergy and Miho's refusal to give up the cat. (She later confesses her husband, whom she found so attractive because of his looks and money, used those assets to cheat on her and his new girlfriend is pregnant.)

The ceremony ended with the couple tossing a bouquet to a person who is meant to be the next most likely to divorce. Rin catches it, but she's not superstitious. She hasn't even been in a relationship during the last eight years. After her parents died in an accident, she's been too busy mothering her two younger siblings and working in the sales department of Pandora Publishing.

Nor is she interested in exchanging namecards with the three guys that the girls meet at the rikon-shiki. There's Matsumoto (Kuranosuke Sasaki), a dentist who likes his freedom, the easy-going, unemployed Shunpei (Kento Nagayama), and Tada (Yuji Tanaka), a flavorist at a food company who's wary of women.

It turns out the dentist knows Rin's boss, who asks the guys to court her and make her interested in romance again. Their unsuccessful attempts are awkward and this weakened Episode 1, but the group of six will likely soon start mixing and matching.

Nakama is trying very hard in this series, but she can't do it all by herself. Love NEET wasn't exactly exciting viewing, but it wasn't as silly as expected either. I sat through the whole hour, which is more than I can say for NTV's Riso no Musuko (Perfect son, Saturdays, 9 p.m.), where it was impossible to believe Kyoka Suzuki was the slightly selfish single mother of a teenager. Nor could I sit through Fuji's Lucky Seven! detective series (Mondays, 9 p.m.), even though Nanako Matsushima, the star of last year's super-successful Kaseifu no Mita, has been brought in to play the boss of this little detective agency.

Renai NEET is worth tuning in to at least once just to observe the TV world's new survival strategy of combining marketing ploys with their drama offerings. At least four of the characters in Episode 1 were conspicuously nibbling the same "koi" (rich) pudding. The product is a collaboration with a major dairy company and is being sold as a limited edition item. It's a pudding pun as "koi" can also mean "love" in Japanese.

Also, the fictional Pandora Publishing has Rin selling their latest release--a little red book called Wasureta Koi no Hajimekata. The book exists in real life. It was released by a publisher several weeks ago and is also available on the TBS website.

Indeed, if none of this season's series appeal to you, you can still spend an amusing evening on the networks' websites looking at the "bangumi (program) goods" they are keen to sell you. T-shirts, cell phone straps and action dolls are popular items. At the TV Asahi website, the Takeru Kanbe action doll (Detective Sugishita's sidekick in the Aibo series) is a little pricey at 21,000 yen even if it does fold its arms just like him.

The Downtown comedy duo action figurines at NTV are slightly cheaper. While I loved the one featuring Masatoshi Hamada with a garbage can over his head, it pays to read the small print. The garbage can is not included. The product only includes a suit, tie, shoes, socks and strawberry-print underpants. You just can't make this stuff up.

Still, they are all a bargain compared to NTV's Kaseifu no Mita doctor's bag with a five-figure price tag. It all makes me want to sit down and calm the nerves with a good cup of Aibo 10 original tea.

Rather than turn themselves into telemarketers, it's time for the networks to expand their script market and recruit and train a new wave of talented young writers. Then maybe viewers could be enticed to buy into their dramas, not the accessories.