Good works show, lesser works tell. I feel like Ultimate Otaku Teacher wrote everything on a brick and hurled it at my face. As we follow the seemingly omnipotent teacher Kagami Jun'ichiro as he leads each of his students in turn to self-discovery and enlightenment, holding their hands from the shadows the entire way, so too is the show hell-bent on holding our hands for every single second, explaining every minor plot point and inobvious conversational subtlety in gory detail, afraid we might have forgotten what happened five minutes ago and that we’ll get bored and lost. It’s overbearing enough that the jokes are stale, or that Kagami has absolutely nothing to offer as a character besides being perfection incarnate, or that the students whose discoveries we follow are equally boring and tossed aside the moment they find their true self and make Kagami look like the everyman hero he blatantly isn’t. But with the punishing amount of repetition and exposition solely for the purpose of making sure we didn’t miss any minor detail, the show goes from being boring and unnoteworthy to being laborious, grueling, and an insult to anyone watching.
It’s clear enough that Kagami is a genius; every time a student is in need of his life counselling, there'll be at least one scene of him hacking the government servers or writing an AI that would normally take years to crunch the data he’s working with, all for the purpose of smugly reminding us how much of a smartypants our hero is. Oh, and that he’s a nice person, that he deeply understands what ails each student in his tiny microcosm of society, and of course that he has a magnetic personality that always keeps people wondering how such a man could be human. And stacked against that are the random slapstick jokes where everyone beats up on him for being a truant, or the school disciplinary committee is constantly on him for his (extensive) transgressions of both school policy and the law, not to mention the almost abusive level of reminders that he’s an otaku just like the rest of us. He also is introduced as having “YD”, a disease that only lets him do what he really wants to do, and while that’s a comical enough stand-in for calling him a lazy selfish piece of trash, they push that label so hard at the very beginning and very end of the show that I'm inevitably left wondering why they just decided to pitch it out the window for the rest.
They’ve tooled the student traumas to fit the theme of an otaku teacher, from the idol whose twin sister is in a gang obsessed with a sentai show to the girl who rarely speaks due to having a voice straight from an anime (har har). There’s also the overly strict head of the disciplinary committee, the legendary manga artist who is constantly looking for inspiration, the ghost who died in a tragic manga pile-up—the list goes on and on. Also of note: there is exactly one male character aside from Kagami, and to say he fills the role of all the classroom’s testosterone is an understatement. He also gets passed over for the female characters for the sake of more fan favorites and less to steal from Kagami’s thunder. Near the end a group of the core students hop in a taxi, and somehow during the shuffling he’s left on the sideline to twiddle his thumbs off camera as we roll away from the school with the car packed full of girls. It feels as if the writers were stepping out in front of the camera for a moment nervously saying “this is how you wanted it, right?”
To convince us that Kagami is doing a public good, we need to see his students grow and mature as a result of learning from him. In depriving us of any time with them after they have their breakthrough besides gags and endlessly praising him to whoever will listen, the end result of Ultimate Otaku Teacher is feeling like we have a bizarre class filled with static weirdos with comically exaggerated personalities. And even that would be more tolerable if Kagami, the constant figure in the limelight, had any shred of interesting characterization. He’s perfect, and the only time he’s imperfect is when there’s slapstick to poke him with for our amusement. He doesn’t even pretend to be fallible or humble. In the second half of the show, he steps out at the beginning of each episode to boldly proclaim “stop, don’t change that channel! You don’t want to miss what’s coming next.” Maybe he’s not so good at reading people after all.