The biggest problem with Gabriel Dropout is how unfunny it is. The skits are impossibly long for very meager payoff, if any. This became painfully apparent back in the segment of ep.2, where a classmate overhears Gabriel and Vignette discussing their angel and demon things, lacks the context, and misunderstands them. It dragged endlessly, beating the joke to death. I decided to give the anime a chance and watched ep.3, where the director has done the same exact thing! But not only that. The (insufferably overlong) cafe segment has set up a joke for the 2nd part where Satania's physical lack of taste came into play. I'm sure someone thought that he was very clever when he came up with that, but in actual fact it was a pathetically weak play. You need 10 of the same within an episode to make a comedy work. Look at Nichijou for a template. The direction was so weak that I even checked if Yamakan was at the helm, taking revenge for the choco cornet. But no, it was a veteran director Masahiko Ohta phoning it in.

Production values were quite decent, but that was not enough. And 3 out of 4 main characters are hideous jerks. In Lucky Star we survived Yamakan's direction because the girls were cute and did cute things. Here though... Vigne's hopeless struggle is painful, not heartwarming.