Review-Tabloid

Saki Katayama is a young and aggressive journalist, who is assigned a reporter position in a tabloid newspaper against her will. Tabloids normally feature gossips, scandals, sex and sports, rather than the meaningful social issues, but her ambition drives her to follow a murder case which happened 3 years ago, and the suspect of the case, Manabe, makes her to believe that he is actually innocent. So her quest for the truth begins.

“Sweet poison”. Hiro in 1998 sheds a special aura, and in this drama, it takes a form of sweet and strong poison. Whoever takes it gets totally intoxicated and cannot get him out of her mind. He looks very different at the first half and the latter, but throughout, he wears this melancholic, sober looks with a touch of insanity, and yet shows his deep emotions, with subtle yet dramatic face expressions. He looks as beautiful as in “D-slope Murder Case”, acts with his eye beams as in “A story of Love”, and adds a heavy and powerful taste in showing what goes in this suspect’s mind. Among Japanese Sanada fans, this drama is one of his most popular works.

The story itself gets relatively low ratings both from the critics and viewers in “Jdrama” site, but I don’t quite understand why, even by trying to see it from a non-Sanada-holic eyes. It handles a serious theme, “justice and the role of mass media”, and as the producer of the drama is itself a part of mass media, things get a bit complicated. Some people may see it as “self-satisfaction” of the TV station, or others may feel that the story goes too quickly to really make the point understood. And yes, it still is a popular TV drama, so unrealistically too much lucky coincident happens to this tabloid newspaper people. But so what, it is a TV drama, and a pretty ambitious one. I like the fast pace and the dramatic incidents, and after all, I am a Sanada-holic and this one cannot be missed by Sanada-holic.

I like Koichi Sato as Saki’s boss, editor of newspaper, and note that Koyuki also appears as underground information seller to Sato. Koyuki is sexy and mysterious, and leaves a strong impression, even though she only appears a few times.