天下制覇

Does it count as killing them if they're still in your house?

Impressions:

Well, it's certainly different from the other idol shows this season, although given the way the episode went, I'm skeptical of how long that will last. First, it's focused on the generic male producer character rather than the girls. It's also leaning into the melodrama pretty hard. His idol buddy rockets up the charts, and then gets a bus dropped on her and dies. Except then she comes back as a disturbingly cheery ghost, haunting him and apparently helping him in his job, which is the… hook (?) where the episode ends. This is weird, right? The ghost girlfriend thing isn't so unusual, but it's weird to be starting out with it, and being so absolutely cheerful with it. And no, it definitely does not give the impression that this is the dude having a mental breakdown. They do slapstick.

Leaving aside the last five minutes of the episode though, it was a pretty uninteresting episode. It's hard to say that it felt like a shoe was going to drop through it. There was some tonal dissonance that hinted at that between how melodramatic the direction was and how flawlessly perfect and devoted to him the girl was, but that's also not particularly unusual for an idol show. Still, I was expecting a (boring) shoe to drop, not a pie with a rock in it. On the other hand, the only song and dance sequence was the OP at the end of the episode, which was relentlessly bubblegum pop, fitting with the weird-ass ending hook.

It's jarring at any rate. I highly doubt that's enough to pull it above being the schlocky idol show it sure seems to be though.