Let’s Play – Episode 1

What’s it about? Sam Young is next in line to inherit her father’s company, but her true passion is game development. Those dreams are seemingly shredded in an instant when her favorite streamer plays her first game and trashes it. And guess who her new neighbor is?

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Do you yearn for a Megatokyo anime that never was? Were you horny for Markiplier in 2016? Is there a powerful urge to rubberneck in your veins? If your answer is “yes,” then I may have a title for you. And also a bridge for sale.

I feel a little guilty for the viscerally negative reaction I had to this premiere. Part of that’s the trick, of course—a story about an indie artist being cruelly maligned by a critic who didn’t understand their art begs one to draw a parallel, no? It’s not that I’m especially angry at the thing. But good lord, does it embody so many of the stereotypes associated with “American comic emulating manga.” It took me almost an hour to watch this 22-minute premiere, purely because I had to take multiple breaks to let the secondhand embarrassment die down.

There are so many hallmarks of amateur writing on display here, things that could’ve been ironed and refined for an adaptation nearly a decade after this material was drawn, but instead it’s a monument to its moment of creation. I was relieved to see that Sam doesn’t suffer from Not Like Other Girls, but her relationships with the other women in this episode are almost as hollow in the other direction. None of them have particular personalities of their own beyond hyping Sam up and telling her how great she is, while all the significant male characters (blood relatives notwithstanding) are all there to be potential love interests.

Sam might as well be the center of the universe, a point that I cannot illustrate better than an understated beat where Sam gets up to leave the coffee shop where she’d been working and just…hands her dog to the barista who works there and leaves. These women aren’t, as near as I can tell, roommates. They barely trade two lines (which have to do with Sam’s game and the male barista having a crush on her). It’s a symptom of having too many ensemble characters show up in your premiere rather than developing one or two significant relationships, but it’s also just weird.

There are also some throwaway lines about sexism in the workplace (Sam is doing data entry when that’s apparently “an intern job”), but it feels token and hollow when we immediately learn that she’s a nepo baby in line to take over at Company Job Inc. The big moment where she stands up to her boss to protect a fellow employee from getting fired likewise falls completely on its face. Sam’s boss Charles decides he’s going to flex and fire the deliveryman who spilled coffee on Sam’s shirt, for reasons. She notes that it had to do with the office secretary, but doesn’t mention that the guy was in a massive hurry to get away from said secretary’s blatant sexual harassment (which we are, to be clear, meant to take as tryhard but harmless). Instead she declares that if people are being fired for making Job Place look bad, she should be first on the chopping block. It’s clearly supposed to be her character-defining Elle Woods moment, and she certainly does display that she’s CEO material. Nothing says upper management like shielding sexual predators from consequences.

This pivotal struggle of this scene is depicted as Sam being menaced by an abstract figure labeled “confrontation.” Now, I love visualizations of abstract concepts as physical threats, but it feels completely out of left field here because the rest of the episode is so concrete—we’re not getting any cutaways to someone’s flight of imagination or otherwise using notably stylized visuals. It feels like a technique borrowed from a remembered cool moment in another series, but without the larger aesthetic framework that made that impactful moment work. It’s a show that overwhelmingly feels borrowed, a clip reel of aesthetic without grounding of its own.

And aaaaaall of that means that there’s barely any time to introduce the actual hook of the story: Sam ending up next door to the guy she admired until he trashed her game’s reputation. That’s a decent premise! But this episode is so overstuffed (while simultaneously feeling 3000 years long) that Marki Marshall Law has been on screen maybe two minutes by the time we hit the credits-rolling meet-cute. That would be pushing it even if the other material was compelling, But the other characters are ciphers, the coloring is flat and the movement stiff, and the actors are speaking weirdly slowly around a script that chooses the most baffling places to throw in loan words.

There are so many other promising-looking romances this season, from comedies to supernatural dramas. And while there’s a possibility this could shake off its early writing stumbles, it’s hard to want to stick around long enough to find out.