22/7 is not really an anime so much as it is a 12-episode shrug. It would be unfair to call the show bottom-of-the-barrel, but rarely does an anime start with so much potential and not just squander it, but fail to deliver on every conceivable level. To its limited credit, 22/7’s failings are not simple ones. This is a series whose shortcomings are borderline artful. It is, if nothing else, interesting to dissect how it went wrong.
To be fair as possible; from day one, there were always going to be two kinds of 22/7 watchers. The show is in large part a promotional vehicle for the real idol group of the same name. Its most famous member stateside, Sally Amaki, is something of an internet sensation for her fluent bilingualism and interaction with overseas idol fans, something the demographic only very rarely gets. For the people watching to see Amaki and her fellow idols work their way around a script for the first time and simply interact while in-character, the series is perfectly competent at, specifically, that thing. If still unremarkable.
Were it that boops alone could make an anime good, we might live in a better world.
22/7’s core premise, however, feels more of a part with some of the group’s actual music. 22/7 are eclectic, as is expected from a J-Idol group. But their most distinct works are odd, baroque, string-heavy, and often tense pop songs. The series’ premise, that eight girls have been selected by shadowy government agency The GI Project to join a pop group, at the behest of a mysterious statue called The Wall, seems to set 22/7 up as a sort of Madoka for the idol girl group anime genre.
It’s an admittedly unfair comparison, but it’s one 22/7 invites, and indeed the show’s opening few episodes hint that we might at some point learn more about the nature of The Wall. We do not, and aside from its first episode--wonderfully tense, with a dusky energy the show never manages to summon again--22/7 seems fairly content to color safely within genre lines for much of its run time. 9 of the series’ 12 episodes cover most of the same ground that anything cribbing notes from The Idolmaster does.
We get character backstories, the cast interacting with each other as they feel each other out during their rise to fame, jokes, a couple actual performances, et cetera. Frustratingly, playing it safe is arguably where the show is at its best. While only about a third of the character focus episodes presented are particularly good, they’re at least well-put-together on a production level. Jun’s episode, in particular, has some of the season’s better directing even as its writing is fundamentally cliche and wrongheaded. Enough so that unless you are exceptionally good at overlooking this kind of thing, it will suck most of the fun out of the room.
So those are the show’s ups and downs for most of its runtime. In its tenth episode, the series finally pulls the trigger on what it attempts to sell as its big reveal. 22/7 are forced to disband, leaving their lives as idols and their happy memories behind. In a better show, this would have emotional impact. Here, it mostly serves to jerk the viewers around for another two episodes before the finale. There, 22/7 re-convene at GI Project headquarters. The Wall begins speaking to them, they confront it about ordering them to break up, affirming their (from any outside perspective, dubious) independent existence as idols and desire to be such. They break into the thing and end up outside, where they perform an impromptu concert for their fans. It turns out to have been orchestrated by GIP the whole time, at the behest of the Wall itself. Roll credits, cue postscript promoting the upcoming OVA.
To clear up any possible misconception, it’s okay for a series to exist as a way to sell something. Many anime manage to have solid emotional cores, well-considered themes, and interesting things to say despite also pulling double duty as a way to get You, Dear Otaku, to buy toys or CDs or whathaveyou.
Where this becomes less okay is when something tries to present itself as a rebellion against a system it is not just participating in but perpetuating. 22/7 are a real idol group, the fictional characters in 22/7 are written (at least, allegedly) quite close to their real-world counterparts. 22/7 as a multimedia project is the brainchild of Yasushi Akimoto, the man behind massive idol pop projects like Onyanko Club and AKB48. Even this is not entirely damning in of itself, the duplicity of music being presented as rebellious but also bankrolled by major labels has deep roots in a wide range of genres including punk and hip-hop, but the sheer flatness of the entire affair undercuts any spirit of affirmation or solidarity it might try to instill.
To admittedly simplify; when your show includes, say, a plot wherein an idol is uncomfortable posing for a swimsuit shoot and resolves that plot by having other characters essentially tell her to get over herself, you can no longer claim to be standing against the system in even symbolic fashion. (Distressingly enough, weird, out-of-place swimsuit fanservice was also a strike against AKB0048, another numerically-titled, idol-related anime property that Akimoto had a hand in. Albeit, a much better one overall).
All of this adds up to quite possibly the most disappointing anime of the year thusfar. The show is certainly not meritless. As mentioned, it’s competent-to-good on the production end of things, and some of the individual character arcs are compelling. Particularly that of Miu, the show’s ostensible protagonist and one of its few genuinely daring choices in how simply un-idol-y she is. (That, too, of course, is sanded away over the course of the show’s run.)
A-1 in general continue to prove themselves as a surprisingly relaible studio in a post-CloverWorks world, and the actual music is quite good if you’re into the particular vibe it’s putting down. The high drama of the show’s opening theme “It’s Difficult”, a cheery number about how life is hard and confusing, feels like it was written for a series with ten times the writing chops of this one.
Still, these relatively meager positives can’t save a fundamentally broken series. It’s a shame, 22/7 seem like a genuinely interesting group, and they deserved a genuinely interesting show to showcase them. This, however, is not that show.