The second-messiest watch of the 2020 Spring season, Wave, Listen To Me is not a show easily classified or dissected. Wave is a situational dramedy with only an intermittent head for drama and good jokes only about half the time. It's hardly a bad series, but "uniquely frustrating" might be a good way to put it.
Despite having one of the most promising opening episodes of the season, Wave often feels hesitant to explore its own central premise--loud, motormouthed, opinionated woman has a graveyard shift radio show broadcast across Japan’s northern province--in favor of flaky attempts at romance, hacky gay jokes, spotty dramatic arcs, and a number of other things. Part of this comes down to the show’s unusual main character. Minare, the aforementioned radio show host, is the rare anime protagonist who is an adult woman. Indeed, anything else you could or couldn’t say about Wave, it goes through no pains to sexualize its lead, and both of these are things to be commended. Minare is a fascinating, complicated character, but Wave does not always seem to know what to do with her, and how well the series actually uses her and her many layers varies. Not coincidentally, so does its general quality, and you will find that the two have a more or less 1 to 1 correlation.
In the show’s weaker arcs, Minare, and the fact that she is an adult woman who is also wildly dysfunctional, feels like the butt of a joke. She is at various points forced to save face at the restaurant she works at, gets into a massive misunderstanding where she thinks a neighbor murdered someone, and so on, and so forth. These are the show’s weaker arcs by a wide margin and it’s a shame they take up a good half of its runtime, and it doesn’t help that they’re pockmarked by grody, occasionally downright problematic jokes. Conversely, when the show gives Minare an equal and opposite. Such as her equally dysfunctional (and much scuzzier) ex Mitsuo, it does much better. The moment that concludes that arc, where Minare almost falls for him again, only to realize he hasn’t changed at all and then promptly throws him over her head with her legs, is one of the show’s best.
By far though the best episodes are those few that take place mostly in the radio booth, and sadly it really is just a few. These episodes (which include the premiere, possibly its strongest episode overall) make the full use of voice actress Riho Sugiyama’s powerful timbre and rapidfire delivery, and they’re as much an audio treat as visually. Sugiyama’s voice is a gift, and any time she gets to fully wild out as Minare it’s a pleasure to hear.
The other aspect of Wave is that it’s intensely regional. The series takes place entirely in Hokkaido, and the show’s finale emphasizes the strong communal spirit of Japan’s northernmost island. This, too, is intriguing, though it’s only explored intermittently.
In general, Wave is at its best when it has a strong focus. Otherwise, it tends to meander in a less-than-flattering way. Of the many side-plots, only that of Mizuho, Minare’s sometimes-roommate and also sometimes-girl crush, and her tentative grasp at her dream of becoming station director is terribly compelling. Even this, due perhaps simply to Wave’s source material being in-progress, is not actually resolved in the series.
The arc, such as it is, of Mikie Tachibana, a profoundly odd restaurant coworker of Minare's, also almost gets there, but there's just not enough time spent on it for it to really connect. And that's really just Wave's core issue. It wants to tell all of these stories, and more, but commits fully to none of them, and is ultimately done in by the limitations of TV anime as a format. There's only so much you can squeeze into 5 hours.
It's not all squandered potential though, by any means. The finale, where Minare must keep the show running through a sudden, unexpected natural disaster in the form of a strong earthquake, provides an interesting glimpse at where Wave might go if it gets another season, casting Minare in a more even-handed role as a grounding rod for the station’s many listeners. It’s worth wanting. As scattershot as Wave, Listen To Me! often is, Minare is a hell of a compelling character, and she deserves another twelve episodes to stretch her legs. That much, we can hope for.
And if you liked this review, why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?