This one waits until you've settled into idol-show comfort, then reminds you the first genre tag is Drama, not Music. Tomo Minaguchi is deliberately unremarkable, a high schooler pulled into an audition she never asked for, and the show treats that as a burden rather than a fairy tale. Every rehearsal happens under the shadow of the original Lemon Angel, the greatest girl group in the country, whose members simply stopped existing in public, and the producer rebuilding the name is not doing it out of love for the music. Thirteen episodes is exactly enough room to make the revival feel less like a comeback and more like a reopened case file. If you like your idol stories where the stage lights are a cover story, this is your obscure 2006 deep cut. The mystery of the vanished girls is the real chorus, and the new group keeps singing over it.

Tomo Minaguchi's ordinary high school life changes when she is asked to audition for a revival of Lemon Angel, a hugely popular girl idol group that abruptly stopped performing at the peak of its fame about ten months earlier. Tomo enrolled at her school to keep a promise to Yui Kono, an upperclassman she admired, and when she learns that Yui was the one who formed Lemon Angel, she commits to the audition for Yui's sake. Only girls with exceptional singing and dancing make the cut, and the tryouts are thick with jealousy and bullying. Through ongoing vocal and dance lessons, Tomo meets rivals who balance one another and become friends, until six girls are finally chosen. Behind it all lies the unexplained story of what happened to the original group.