Most of you are probably too young  to remember the television series Bewitched.  It was about a guy, Darrin, who lived a normal, boring salaryman life in the affluent American suburbs. Darrin was so dull and uninteresting that after a few years, they switched the actor who played him and mostly no one noticed. 

The “comedy” in Bewitched was centered around Darrin’s wife – a vivacious, beautiful woman…who was a witch. Samantha could wiggle her nose and make objects appear and disappear and change forms and turn people into toads and that kind of thing. That might have been marginally amusing on it’s own, but it wasn’t the point. The point of the series is that this beautiful, vivacious, magically powered woman (and all her bohemian relatives) were constantly being forced by Darrin in his utter dullness to conform to American middle class affluent white life. It was supposed to be hi-larious watching Darrin (or his boss, or neighbor) get all confuzzled by a magic spell. Watching Bewitched as a child, I constantly felt so angry. I wanted Samantha to take her cool powers, her fun and colorful family and burn down whereeverthefuck she was supposed to be living. 

To me, Bewitched was not a comedy, it was a tragedy. Instead of making Samantha the protagonist, it insisted on centering Darrin with his soul-killing boringness, sexist and racist boss and attitudes and general embodiment of Greyface to Samantha and her Erisian clan. 

I finally sat down to watch Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid (streaming free and legally on Crunchyroll) and by the second episode, I realized that I was watching Bewitched all over again.  It’s absolutely possible that Darrin, I mean Kobayashi, might become a warm loving person, but about halfway through the second episode, when she was being kind to Kanna, after basically being an asshole to Tohru and demanding Tohru never use her powers after Tohru worked so hard to make her happy, I gave up.

Darrin is not interesting.  Forcing Samantha to be boring is not funny.

Any series that takes a character with cool powers and then spends all it’s time telling that character to never use those powers? Nope. ^_^;

Yes, Tohru is in love with Kobayashi. And that’s the entirely of that plot complication. It’s got nowhere to go, because Kobayashi being an absolute gut-searing bore is the plot. And it’s all the comedy too.

Nope.

Ratings:

Art – 6 Moe blobs and bouncing breasts
Story – 3 I fantasized about rewriting it wholly into Tohru and her human’s fun adventures!
Characters – 6 Speaking of 70s TV shows. It was all Odd Couple hijinks
Service – yeppers
Yuri – 1

Overall – 5

Obviously, lots of people enjoy the series – and I’m glad. I’m just not one of them.