It hooks you with a joke and then quietly guts you. Shuichi's lyric sheet blows out of his hands in the park, a stranger reads it, calls it talentless garbage, and one throwaway insult from Eiri Yuki becomes the engine of the entire series. That's the trick here: the comedy is loud and chibi-faced, K waving a gun to motivate his artist, Sakano spiraling into a panic attack, Ryuichi Sakuma babbling at Kumagoro like a toddler with a stadium tour, while underneath it Yuki is a chain-smoking romance novelist who cannot say a kind thing without immediately taking it back. Shuichi loves him anyway, embarrassingly, out loud, in a way most romance leads are too cool to try. Bad Luck's studio deadlines are the plot, Tohma Seguchi and Nittle Grasper are the shadow, but the show is really about a pink-haired kid refusing to be dismissed. Thirteen episodes, no tidy ending, and you'll still hear "The Rage Beat" in your head for a decade.

Shuichi has always wanted to follow the path of his idol Ryuichi Sakuma and the group Nittle Grasper. Together with his best friend Hiro, he has started a band, Bad Luck, and landed a contract with a major label. Studio deadlines are closing in, though, and he still has no finished lyrics for any song. Late one night in a park, his lyric sheet blows away and lands at the feet of a striking stranger: Eiri Yuki, a well-known novelist, who tells Shuichi he has no talent at all. Stung, Shuichi completes his song just to seek Yuki out and face him again, but is anger really what drives him, or has he fallen for Yuki? The result is a comedic romance set in the music world.