Nakamura Yoshiki’s Skip Beat! is the result when three people with fundamentally rotten people find their passion exactly where it belongs. No, not in law, in show business. Japan’s media entertainment revolves around TV personalities and actors first, with idols and animators second, but of course since the target audience of an anime certainly cares more about the latter we end up with a dearth of works dealing with the flesh-and-blood actors and actresses that make the entertainment world go ‘round. As if idol shows weren’t already a hotbed for narcissism and manipulation.
The least flawed by a huge margin is the newcomer Kyoko. Make no mistake, despite all appearances she's perfect. Her personality jumps from the extremes of overly chipper and comically attached to the people around her, the excitement and crowd-pleasing that come from a life of serving customers at a traditional inn before running away to Tokyo with her boyfriend Shou and starting life anew, to the hotheaded and intensely angry person born when she discovered that Shou had only brought her to Tokyo to have a free servant making his meals and supporting him financially with her blood, sweat, tears, and wasted youth. Her transformation from the homely girl with long black hair in the first episode into a stylish assertive woman with short orange hair cuts quite a figure, appropriate for our introduction into the cutthroat world of entertainment. Yet for her purported “fatal flaw” of being unable to express love while her obsession with getting revenge on Shou remains, her acting skills and quick thinking are top-notch even without any formal training. Sure it does the trick of pushing the plot along—and creating a ridiculous dichotomy for comedic effect—but the rightfully hurt actors around her will probably start looking for someone to dump them so they can start drinking the punch.
Her revenge is simple: Shou is an up-and-coming star in entertainment, an upstart who is quickly reaching the realm of the national heartthrob Ren. To knock him down a peg, she has to climb to the top of the entertainment world and beat Shou at his own game. And since this is a shoujo, and so far we have met exactly one pretty boy and learned the name of another, we already know where Kyoko is going to end up in her quest. She is allowed to join Ren’s company as part of a new rehabilitation program called “Love Me”, always announced by an offscreen narrator with a sickeningly sweet voice and imbuing in Kyoko a sense of humiliation that makes me wonder if the narration isn’t diegetic, although maybe it’s just the bright pink jumpsuit she is perpetually forced to wear in public. The program, where she is allowed to be a normal employee on the condition that she performs a certain objective amount of goodwill and selfless aid to her fellow man, recognizes the two essential facts of Kyoko’s personality that we need to know: she is a diamond in the rough, worthy of being brought into a top company just from a single interview, and that she has a personality pulled from behind the dumpster.
But the big in-joke of Skip Beat! is that everyone else deserves to be thrown into the Love Me program infinitely more than her. To my mind there isn’t a single character who escapes being one-dimensional without the second dimension being “human garbage.” Shou is the most obvious; from the first episode where Kyoko overhears him talking to a manager about how he is exploiting Kyoko for the sake of his career, I expected the show to renege on his character and explain it away as a misunderstanding, but it follows through and takes the gutsy move of standing by his morally reprehensive personality. Ren is more of a mixed bag, one moment sporting a kind and nurturing tenderness towards his coworkers and subordinates, and suddenly turning on a dime to tease Kyoko and judge her from on high. Brief cuts to his angry reaction when she talks about her coming revenge on Shou would indicate that he has a deeper, more nuanced personality borne of a tragic backstory, but once again we avoid the usual tropes and just get him at surface level, a generally kind person ticked off by Kyoko’s shallow motivations for entering show business. As if his subsequent bullying wasn’t enough proof that he deserves to be in the Love Me section, some unresolved last-minute exposition conspires to make him worthy of the title once and for all, as well as setting up his obligatory romantic shoujo overtones with Kyoko that are ultimately left as unresolved as her revenge fantasies with Shou.
In reality more than the story or the characters, the show lives on the small moments that it uses, either to pull us in to an interesting glimpse at the entertainment world or to lampoon it all for a laugh. The scenes of Kyoko and Ren acting take us out of the world of Skip Beat! and into the story within the story, and it’s interesting to see how these now-familiar characters take on new identities and backstories at the drop of a hat, acting out dynamics they don’t actually share in real life. By contrast the core of the show’s comedy is in the reactions between characters, often switching to a chibi style popular amongst anime comedies in general but with a level of exaggeration—especially with Kyoko’s facial expressions—and coupled with random interjections from an outside narrator or the occasional creeped-out bystander that make it feel like a bizarre but tangibly real element of the world.
After botching a job as background mascot on a TV interview with Shou, there is a running gag where Kyoko is seen in a giant chicken suit that magically can put on the same ridiculous facial features that she is presumably wearing beneath the suit. One way this comes about is when Ren is feeling depressed and introspective, and Kyoko in the suit is able to give him the advice that she wouldn’t normally be able to give as a bottom of the totem pole assistant. Of course this ends up creating some classic romantic misunderstandings and confessions laden with dramatic irony, but my interpretation is different. The directors and business owners are all auteurs, and characteristically outlandish for the entertainment world, from the camel-riding head of Kyoko and Ren’s company to the man with pierced ears in charge of Kyoko’s first commercial break. By the end of the show I was left with one overwhelming impression: the entertainment industry is full of weirdos and terrible personalities, to the point where narcissism and using other people as stepping stones are relaxing and familiar flaws by comparison. With all those other crazy and sinister people around, who would bat an eye at an experienced actor taking advice from a giant chicken?