Bonus Preview: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious

Streams: Crunchyroll on Saturdays

Rating: 2 (of 5)

(NOTE: Given how late this series is debuting, I have decided to post this as a separate post rather than temporarily kick the main Preview Guide post back to sticky status.)

This new light comedy series features protagonist Yuuri, a boy who has lost his parents to an accident and, due to financial constraints, has decided to dismiss his servants and try to live alone in the family’s small mansion. A mysterious, sexy, purple-eyed maid (whose name he later learns is Lilith) suddenly shows up on his doorstep as he’s struggling to get by and offers to work as a servant just for room and board. But she seems a little too good to be true, and Yuuri finds himself so overwhelmed by her presence that he starts to suspect that she’s up to something. (And he clearly can’t tell when she’s just trying to mess with him.) While she does seem to have an ulterior motive, it’s nothing so nefarious as Yuuri imagines.

As premises for a potential romantic comedy go, this isn’t a bad one. However, the execution is decidedly lacking. A review of the first volume of the source manga criticized the content harshly for being obnoxiously repetitive with a single joke (i.e., that Lilith is up to something devious when she’s really not), and that problem definitely carries over to anime form. The gimmick with Yuuri misinterpreting in the most paranoid way what Lilith is or isn’t doing, and Lilith playing along with it only for that to backfire when it makes the situation even worse, is mildly funny the first time but gets increasingly tedious as it repeats in variations as the episode progresses. Doesn’t also help that there some inexplicable details here, or that Yuuri is an idiot; if there’s a profile of your mysterious maid in a book in the mansion’s library and you’re curious about her, why just look at her name instead of the whole profile? The end implies that Lilith does already know Yuuri and came to the mansion to help him upon learning of his parents’ death, so there may be a sweet story here, but the attempts to set it up don’t gel. Another problem is that neither character proves all that interesting; Lilith just isn’t playful enough for her character to be effective, for instance.

Technical merits and character designs also fail to impress here, leaving the series with little to fall back on. Maybe this one will get better as additional characters shown in the opener get added in, but will anyone still be watching by that point?