The Daily Lives of High School Boys
Summary: Tadikuni, Yoshitake, and Hidenoir are three classmates who are more or less friends and do what high schoolers do everywhere, really strange hijinks that don't make a lot of sense in retrospect.
The Good: For people who have seen one too many "cute girls doing cute things" shows and are feeling jaded check out at least the first episode of this show, you'll feel much more balanced afterwards. I've often felt like those cute girl shows were a bit odd since they were nothing like the high school life I had (or that any one I knew had) but this show feels a lot closer for capturing the just plain weirdness of high schoolers, heck some of my friends probably could have one-upped the characters from here at times (although the reoccuring after the credits bit, high school girls are funky, felt too strange to me a lot of the time, too chunni). And that's where the fun of the series comes in, the sheer absurdity of the skits and gags, and a lot of them are connected as well so the show has a pretty good sized cast by the end, for some people this will be just the kind of series they need to see.
The Bad: Humor is hit or miss for everyone and sadly this show was largely a miss for me. I did like one or two skits in each episode but simply didn't find most of them funny. It wasn't that they were too weird or random (well, a few were but that wasn't the reason for the majority of them), I just found that I didn't really care about the characters and when you don't care it's hard to care about what they do. Also, I know that there are times when repeating a joke to death becomes a gag itself but it's not one that I found funny and sadly the show did, we just had very different ideas of humor and I even contemplated dropping the show a few times since I was getting too bored by it.
The Production Values: I will probably annoy a number of fans out there but I didn't really like the voice acting in this series. Why? Because it's a series about high schoolers yet nobody sounds a day under 22 and that's being generous, it just got really disconcerting and some of the characters were taking me out of the story every time they talked. I imagine you could write that off as a gag in and of itself but it just didn't work for me in the end.
So while it's not a bad show, tedious at times but not bad, this just wasn't my thing in the end so I'm giving it a 3 out of 5. For those who want to check it out it's streaming on hulu currently (which means US only sadly) and the US anime licensor NIS America has picked it up and will be releasing a box set sometime in 2014.
