Review: Sapuri

Summary
Alternative Titles: サプリ, Sappli, Supply, Suppliment
Genre: Romance, workplace
Episodes: 11
Broadcast: Jul. - Sept. 2006
Starring:

• Ito Misaki as Fuji Minami
• Kamenashi Kazuya as Ishida Yuya
• Eita as Ogiwara Satoshi

Fuji Minami is a 29-year-old employee at a marketing firm. One day, while riding the train to work, she finds a lost cellphone ringing and answers it. A young man named Ishida Yuya claims that he has lost his cellphone and wants her to return it to him before his job interview. When Ishida gets hired and starts working, he notices that Fuji Minami works in the exact same office.

Review
Sapuri is a pure romance drama that takes place in the workplace. There is absolutely no other genre you can really recognize. In other words, it's just full of love triangles. Having said that, Sapuri is unquestionably the most boring drama I’ve ever watched. Each episode mainly deals with the relationships between the workers at the marketing firm. About mid-way through the series, if you were to draw a correlation chart that shows who likes who, it would become pretty complex. However, many of the relationships between characters are every predictable and there aren’t any significant plot twists. You could probably take a good guess of the two employees that will end up together at the end. In addition, Sapuri takes place mostly in a office, which makes it even more boring to watch.

On the other hand, not 100% of Sapuri is about romance. Romance does dominate most of the series, but there is a subplot in every episode about the marketing firm that Fuji and Ishida work at. The marketing firm is called Create Agency and it produces CMs for various companies (CM is a abbreviation used by the Japanese for the word commercial). Basically in every episode, they create a different commercial for a different product or service and it’s somewhat interesting to see how they create the CMs. These segments can be interesting if you’re the business type.


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Pros

• Scenes showing the creation of CMs can be interesting

Cons

• Boring since it’s a pure romance drama, contains no other genres
• Basically about love triangles and not much else
• Relationships between characters are predictable
• Not many unexpected plot twists to keep story interesting
• Mostly takes place in one office

Recommendation
I bet many females will watch it because Kamenashi Kazuya (KAT-TUN) plays the lead role, but it’s not worth it to just watch Sapuri because of one person. I had to force myself to watch it so that I could review it. In other words, I watched it so that you don’t have to.

Rating: 5/10

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