The noitaminA block’s been out of commission for a few months now, and it’s not coming back as strongly as it could be. One timeslot is being taken up by Ano Hana, a move that’s good advertising for A-1 Pictures but means one less new show this season. Still, the new show we do get comes from strong source material; Hiromu Arakawa’s Shonen Sunday hit Silver Spoon.

Silver Spoon opened really abruptly, to the extent that it was pretty hard to get into at first. While I’m normally on board with introducing characters through their actions, this show made a big deal of the male lead overreacting to everything agriculture and farm related, to the extent that it got pretty tiring. I was hoping the other characters would provide a little more interest, but they were introduced in equally slapdash, token ways. Throughout the whole episode, the presentation was almost trying to be bland unfunny. It’s something that makes me wonder whether Tomohiko Ito, who’s a pretty inexperienced director to begin with, is working with the b-team at A-1 while the a-team handles Servant x Service. To top it off, the soundtrack was at a level where “mediocre” would be a generous label. I wanted to at least like this one, but it’s just not worth any more time on the level it’s at. Dropped.

Though it at least had one funny joke