With ep.3, Mitsudomoe got its mojo back. Certainly, doubts in the long-term viability of the formula are going to persist, and then the usual "slice of life" problem is going to occur, but then, how many episodes did The Simpsons run for?

One thing I appreciated in particular was how the creators manage to produce the funny by what appears to be beating a dead horse with persistence. They just beat and beat and beat it, and then... suddenly... how did that happen! That's what I thought when the usual, banal comedy of misunderstandings set-up played out (e.g. Person A says X about Y (book), and person B thinks it was said about Z (pantsu)). This is a very good way to mine the vein of laugh in anime these days, because everything was tried before. Otherwise, it's either back to combining more and more disparate elements, turning the sexploitation up until TV melts, or just feed on remakes of the classics.

All along, the visual feast continued. Aside from every sister remaining plain beautiful (especially in case of Mitsuba), Mitsudomoe very much tells me that anime has a bright future in the Blu-ray era. I am sure most other bloggers knew it for a while, but I am slow. I don't even have a BD player. One funny new trick that I noticed in ep.3 was how the director intentionally makes scenes with very small characters doing something, and you can see every detail, to the extent it simply was impossible on the analog TV. More creative freedom through technology.