Viewed: 2018. 07/15-07/23
Netflix episode list and trailer available here.
This post is in no way sponsored or endorsed by Netflix.
About a year after watching Diamond Lover, I accidentally stumbled onto Good Morning Call, the story of two high school students, forced by circumstance to live together, with just one catch, nobody can ever find out.
Nao Yoshikawa (Haruka Fukuhara) and Hisashi Uehara (Shunya Shirashi) are students at the same high school, but where Nao is a lowly freshman, Uehara is the most popular boy at school. After they are conned into renting the same apartment, Nao and Uehara begin to live together, but the animosity between them makes it extremely rocky ground for love to bloom. Uehara is bossy and picks on Nao, when he isn’t ignoring her entirely, and eats her food. Nao watches with interest as all of the girls chase Uehara, and gets somewhat of a thrill knowing that she sees a side of him that nobody else does, leaving her to wonder, what makes him so special?
As Nao begins to cultivate feelings for Uehara, Uehara’s childhood crush, Yuri, comes back into the picture, and Nao’s best friend, Marina, learns Nao and Uehara’s secret. There’s a lot of comedy in this one, with fan girls fawning all over Uehara, one of the schools top three most popular boys, as well as a classmate, who goes around confessing his love to every girl he meets. Intended for a younger audience, this is a charming, lighthearted romantic comedy that hits the right notes, based on a manga series of the same name.
I’ve been reading manga for a number of years but I haven’t found the books for this series (yet). I think that taking a chance and watching this series is what really opened up a whole new world of delight in the Asian romantic comedy, be it Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc. I can’t tell you how much of this stuff is available on Netflix and once the floodgates opened, I found a lovely new genre that I’d never even heard of before.
Keep watching this space on Fridays, now for the next few months, as I share some of my other favorite finds that I’ve been binge-watching on Netflix. If this post inspires you to see the series for the first time, or if you’re a veteran viewer of Good Morning Call, please consider commenting and letting me know what you liked or didn’t like about the series. I look forward to hearing from you.
Lauren Miller 