As the spillover effects from the Nakai Masahiro & FujiTV's scandal continues to spread far and wide, its Winter 2025 season dramas are facing extremely challenging headwinds with the departure of sponsors and reviewing or termination of collaborations with government bodies and the private sector.
This article from News Post Seven highlights some unexpected similarities with the current situation as well as observations about the productions in this season
* As compared to its key competitors i.e. TBS, NTV and TV Asahi, FujiTV has 5 offerings this season in the primetime timeslots i.e. 7pm to 11pm, which is 2 more than the others, namely:
- 119 Emergency Call
- Himitsu ~ THE TOP SECRET ~
- Aishii ~ Shunkan kioku sousa Hiiragi han ~
- Mondai Bukken
- Nippon ichi no saitei otoko
* The writer of the article wonders whether it was a coincidence or a premonition that these offerings seem to reflect the mess that FujiTV finds itself in:
- "119 Emergency Call" is set in a fire station's communications command centre where its officers have to deal with emergencies that involve life and death situations -> FujiTV's survival is in the balance due to the pullout of sponsors, loss of advertisement income, refusals to work with them by various organisations and the impact of its role in the scandal yet to be ascertained which could open up the possibility of lawsuits and penalties.
- "Himitsu ~ THE TOP SECRET ~" is a police suspense story using a special MRI special to create images of the brain to be used for investigation purposes -> FujiTV's press conferences were filled with ambiguous and opaque answers such as "unable to answer for the sake of protecting privacy", "yet to be ascertained" which coincide with the title.
- "Aishii ~ Shunkan kioku sousa Hiiragi han ~" features the lead character played by Haru taking on difficult cases with her special ability nicknamed Camera Eye (photographic memory) and grappling with her painful and unforgettable past. -> This coincides with the victim in Nakai's case who has to deal with the emotional scars from what happened even till now.
- "Mondai Bukken" is a real estate-themed mystery where the characters try to solve various strange things happening at different properties. -> There are two interpretations here i.e. FujiTV is a problematic property for its parent group and that Fuji Media Holdings actually earns more money from the property business than its media contents business.
- "Nipponichi no saitei otoko" features Katori Shingo as a man who is at his wits' end in life and forms a fake family with his brother-in-law and the latter's children. -> FujiTV's executives have been criticised for their poor handling of the crisis and nicknamed as the worst men in Japan.
* Compared to TBS' "Mikami-sensei" or NTV's "Hotspot" or TV Asahi's "Private Banker" which have been highlighted as rather unconventional works this season, FujiTV's lineup is perceived to be very conservative and skewed towards certain niche areas:
- The works are serious in terms of settings and tones where the lead character (s) finds himself or herself in challenging circumstances and has to deal with difficulties that come one after another.
- Comparatively, there is lesser room for them to catch a breather as the problems are neverending. Humour is lacking in most of the works.
- Except for "Nipponichi no saitei otoko", the other 4 works feature weekly guests and are episodic in nature i.e. one case featured in one episode. These 4 also deal with life and death issues which is seen as a safe and tested formula to get a certain level of ratings in the TV drama industry.
* However, playing it safe is increasingly seen as a weak strategy to secure critical praise and boost online streaming views as such "been-there-done-that" stories are felt to be too predictable and lacking in novelty. Even without the fallout caused by FujiTV's scandal, it would have been hard to market these dramas well.
* One other thing noted is the low number of cast members as compared to dramas from other TV stations. Based on the cast charts shown on the FujiTV official websites, "Mondai Bukken" has 6 characters, "Nipponichi no saitei otoko" has 7 and "Aishi" features a regular cast of just 5 members in the Hiiragi team. It seems to reflect the tightening of budgets to spend on a smaller number of actors and make the productions more compact as compared to before.
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My comments:
While I agree that the similarities highlighted in the article seemed too coincidental on hindsight, I thought that the point about "Aishii" with the victim felt a bit "off" and rather insensitive given the nature of this scandal.
With regard to the point about a smaller cast, I would say that this is also due to the point raised above about having weekly guests. Usually, cast charts feature "regular characters" only i.e. those who appear on a recurring basis and have a certain degree of importance in the story so for a drama like "Aishii", most likely the cast chart would only show the key characters i.e. the detectives while the criminals and suspects do not usually appear unless they turn out to be the big baddie at the end.
Another reason for this phenomenon could be due to the nature of the story. If the drama doesn't feature many characters in the first place such as a family drama, it will definitely have a shorter cast list as compared to something like a school drama where you need to have people playing teachers and students. However, I do agree with the point that having lesser characters does sometimes show that the production budget may be lesser. It is indeed unusual for primetime dramas to be so "basic" in terms of the lineup when compared to late night dramas.
In order to find out whether the article's observation about the cast size is true, I checked the official websites of the primetime dramas for FujiTV, TBS, NTV and TV Asahi. Some things to note though:
- While "Himitsu" was included under FujiTV's count despite being made by Kansai TV, the writer omitted "Forest" from TV Asahi's list even though it is made by ABC TV.
- There is a discrepancy between the numbers in the cast chart and the cast list as shown in the table below.
- Cast charts and lists may change over the course of the season with the revelation of new characters. The numbers in the table below are accurate as of 3 Feb 2025.
- I have counted those where the characters are already shown in the cast charts even if the actors playing them have not been revealed e.g. "Kujaku no dansu, dare ga mita?".
- Animals and voice actors of animated characters were not counted in this tally.
- Only dramas that have a starting time within the primetime period of 7pm to 11pm were included in this tally.
- TV Tokyo dramas were excluded this time since they were not mentioned in the writer's analysis.
Observations
- While the numbers do show that FujiTV's dramas this season have a lower average cast size compared to the other TV stations, the unusually high number for TBS is actually due to "Mikami-sensei" which has 44 cast members, of which 29 of them are students. TV Asahi's "Aibou Season 23" has a high cast number as well due to most of them being police officers.
- The lower average could also be due to the fact that FujiTV has 5 dramas so the production budget is spread thinner across each of them thus leading to a smaller cast size.
- For dramas which have weekly guests e.g. "Kaseifu no Mitazono Season 7", the number of regular cast members tends to be on the low side. However, if you consider the guest list as well and assume that there are at least 2 per episode, the actual total should balloon to as much as more than double the number of regulars.
- The numbers between the cast chart and cast list can differ by a lot at times as some supporting cast members' photos don't get included in the chart especially if it is a conscious attempt to prevent clutter in the chart or over-complicating it. However, most of the dramas in the sample are seeing relatively small discrepancies between both sets of data which could be due to new cast members announced along the way on one side but not on the other.
- The average cast size for this season's primetime dramas is about 17 based on the above sample's cast chart numbers. In this sense, 4 out of 5 FujiTV's dramas are indeed below this number while "Himitsu" is on par. Comparatively, TBS' dramas are all above average, NTV has 2 out of 3 while TV Asahi has 1 out of 4 which exceed this figure. However, I think that the nature of the TBS dramas other than "Mikami-sensei" are seeing higher numbers partly due to the nature of their storylines which needs to cover more characters.
It might take more samples over a longer time to obtain more insights but from what we can tell from this season's numbers, FujiTV's cast size does seem a bit smaller across the board when compared to its competitors for this season. As to whether this is an once-off phenomenon, has been going on for a while or will continue in the future especially as some media articles are saying that actors and celebrities are seemingly becoming more cautious about getting involved in FujiTV's productions due to the ongoing scandal, only time will tell.
