Ooya-san wa Shishunki! is what happens when you compress each episode of a generic twelve episode slice-of-life show to the two minutes where it is actually entertaining. There is a setting, a slimmed down cast of characters, and each episode has their own unique flavor, but of course there would not be nearly enough substance to stretch things out to a full 25 minutes per week without it wearing terribly thin. They cook pork soup together? Great, a minute and a half of screen time should do the trick. Clothes shopping? A minute or less, so the other minute can be used for other gags. The classic festival episode with yukatas, fireworks, and love in the air? Let’s skip the last one, seeing as the girl is a middle schooler and the guy is a college student at worst.
Setting up a male protagonist with a pint-sized girl for a landlord and an older and more refined woman for a next-door neighbor is the sort of setting one would expect for harem antics to occur (indeed he even mentally remarks “my new life rocks” in the first episode; maybe he should lay off the anime?), but because we catch them at very spread-out moments in time it seems feasible that all three of them lead their own busy lives and that we are only catching their more amusing days. All the gags and settings are tried and true, but they are rattled off at a breakneck pace to fit in the time constraints, which again gives us the perfect amount of time to quickly chuckle to ourselves before moving right along.
If none of the gags deserve more than that brief laughter, then they also don’t deserve less, and all the drawn out moments of hysteria and quieter sections connecting one joke to the next are completely cut. Ditto the plot, and thank god for that. There are only 20 minutes of content or less to be sure, and being done with the show I can hardly expect to ever return to it again. But I can think of a dozen shows off the top of my head that I wasted hours on that would have been better stripped down to the bone in the same way.