Summary
Let’s Get Divorced saddles a decent premise and likeable performers with a brutally overextended runtime, burying the core story in hours of pointless filler.
This review of the 2023 Japanese Netflix series Let’s Get Divorced Season 1 does not contain spoilers.
There are presumably only so many ways you can reinvent a rom-com, and on this level at least, the Japanese Netflix series Let’s Get Divorced deserves a degree of credit. It’s not often you can say a romantic drama is about a couple trying to separate, not get together.
Let’s Get Divorced Season 1 review and plot summary
This is, nonetheless, the premise of the show, which finds fledgling politician Taishi Shoji (Tori Matsuzaka) and beloved television actress Yui (Riisa Naka) trying to part ways after the former is snapped in public with a young reporter, Sakurako (Lisa Oda).
So, you know, credit where it’s due. This premise of a flailing relationship complicated by two high-profile industries, public expectations, and private difficulties, feels novel, fresh, and full of potential.
That potential would have easily sustained a feature film. A ten-hour series? Not so much.
Anyway, the drama and comedy of Let’s Get Divorced both stem from the leads’ frustrating inability to do so given the pushing and pulling of various personal and professional headwinds. Yui’s appeal is as a housewife, so her management doesn’t want the couple to separate, while Taishi’s mother forbids the divorce to protect his election campaign, which she runs.
The couple nonetheless decides to lawyer up, but this only introduces more difficulties when it becomes clear their respective representatives have a romantic past of their own.
Is Let’s Get Divorced good or bad?
Let’s Get Divorced has the light touch and fondness for chaos that seems to fuel most knockabout romantic comedies, but it inexplicably has the episode order and runtime of a prestige drama.
All nine episodes of this show run over an hour, and that space has to be filled with something, which leads to an abundance of digressions that bury the central story in tedium.
What’s perhaps all the more egregious is that, despite all this time to develop characters, subplots, and themes, Let’s Get Divorced still wants to maintain the genre’s typically detached, incurious style. Potentially incisive examination of both politics and entertainment is left by the wayside in favor of pointless nonsense, and potentially fascinating figures are left as cartoonish cardboard cut-outs, devoid of depth and insight.
Is Let’s Get Divorced worth watching?
It’d be easy to recommend Let’s Get Divorced in almost any other format. The performers are likable, the chemistry is there, and the plot, while predictable in its broad strokes, possesses a fair amount of charm in the details.
The length, however, is brutally off-putting, and it’s genuinely hard to imagine anyone sticking with this until the end.
What did you think of Let’s Get Divorced Season 1? Comment below.
You can watch this series with a subscription to Netflix.
