Summary
Japanese series Tokyo Alice Season 1 unfortunately provides a wafer-thin story and character development, making the Amazon Original Series a real shame.
It seems after Netflix’s success in the Asian market for streaming content, Amazon is looking to tap into the same goldmine – Japanese series Tokyo Alice Season 1 parachuted onto the platform on June 21st, with barely any advertisement beforehand. Like Netflix, they tend to slip these series on in the hope that the West embrace it just by accident. Well, fortunately for me, I keep an eye on these things, but I kind of wish I didn’t, because the Amazon Original series is kind of bizarre.
Or maybe it is the way it opened in the first ever episode; Tokyo Alice is constructed around four women whom all have varying romances and are at different stages of their career. The Japanese series opens up with the strangest of intentions to try and draw the audience in, before introducing each character with title screens. Amazon series Tokyo Alice portrays these protagonists differently; a shopaholic, a manga artist who is heartbroken by her ex, a careerist and a romantic. Imagine if they all walked into a bar?
Japanese series Tokyo Alice is not brave, and pointedly unimaginative with its characters. The Amazon Original prefers to play it safe with the characters, with wafer-thin development and focusing on just story progression alone. Each episode is 30 minutes long, but it wastes time bamboozling through each scenario like there is space for a feature-length. I just wanted the characters to be more enticing, but it’s bland, boring and unoriginal.
It may sound like I am unreasonably pessimistic about this series, but from the start, you know what type of content you are experiencing, and unfortunately, despite Tokyo Alice attempting to form four women together in some courageous sisterhood, the Amazon series is two-dimensional and is purely served for entertainment purposes.
The Japanese series is a real shame – the premise had promise.
