The most interesting Japanese television dramas for me fall into one of four patterns. By "interesting" I do not necessarily mean most entertaining. There are any number of dramas that resemble the process of watching "reality television": we cannot stop watching; we have no idea why we're hooked; the drama is quickly forgotten about once the "story" is over. And by pattern I do not mean "genre" (as in dramas that can be labeled "crime" or "boy-love" stories). The four patterns I describe below are specifically meant to cut across these convenient tools of marketing since if a story is a good one it will not belong to any genre or shelf.
I will first define the four patterns then explain why I feel it is necessary to keep these larger, generalized frameworks in mind. I tend to find that if a drama doesn't fall into one of these four patterns, my desire to abandon it is nearly instantaneous.
Dramas of the heart
Plotless but story-based. Mainly feel-good but takes the darker side of life seriously.
Examples: WOMAN (2013), KISEKI NO HITO (2016), BEAUTIFUL LIFE (2000), KIOKU (2018), YASASHII JIKAN (2005), JOOH NO KYOSHITSU ~ QUEEN OF THE CLASSROOM (2005), KASEIFU NO MITA (2011).
Dramas of conflict and resolution
Plot-driven; based solely on solving extremely difficult problems. Unlike dramas of the heart, character is revealed entirely through action. An examination of a person's inner life is unnecessary.
Examples: BORDER (2014), AVALANCHE (2021), ISHITSUBUTE (2017), TAIYO WA UGOKANAI (2021), VIVANT (2023). Every drama that is based on an Ikeido Jun novel. Just about every drama that centers around the success or failure of a business venture.
Dramas of social commentary
Primarily interested in having something to say about contemporary Japan. What it loses in realism it gains by reliance on plot, though sparing itself from the fate of formulaic genre narratives.
Examples: HIRUGAO (2014), YAKOU KANRANSHA (2013), MUKAI NO BAZURU KAZOKU (2019), SHINBUN KISHA (2022), KAHOGO NO KAHOKO (2017)
Dramas of pop culture
Stories intent on capturing an accessible style so that the mainstream can recognize and affirm itself. Its impulses are largely comedic, its target audience tending to the young.
Examples: OSSAN'S LOVE (2018), RICH MAN, POOR WOMAN (2012), ANATA NO KOTO WA SORE HODO (2017), KOI GA HETA DEMO IKITEMASU (2016), JIMI NI SUGOI (2016). Any early Kimura Takuya romantic comedy. Any trendy manga-based story adapted for television.
It goes without saying that the best dramas contain elements of all four patterns. And that the greatest dramas transcend all categories. Historical dramas like the NHK Taiga drama series follow history and not patterns. And dramas that don't take themselves seriously fall, by definition, outside the patterns.
I should also say that I don't watch a drama and then refer back to these patterns to see where it falls. I have watched hundreds of dramas by now, so great in number that these patterns have become second nature to me.
Why do I feel it is necessary to draw up these patterns? Because I feel that if one is going to pass judgment on the work of others one must be able to defend why you hold that opinion. In order to begin to do that, one must understand first who or what a drama is in conversation with. There isn't a great work of art anywhere that isn't in conversation with something or someone else. The New Testament responding to the Old is the best example of that. On the individual level, one sees tradition, or in its lesser form, convention at work wherever you go.
The standard of criticism for the world of literature isn't that difficult. We now have works that go back 2,500 years that are still read today. To be able to judge what is good work all one has to do is become familiar with the works that have stood the test of time. If you can see for yourself why a work has endured, then it is not difficult to dismiss out of hand works written today for being no more than a temporary enthusiasm. Same goes for the world of painting, even though the past one hundred years has seen the tyranny of abstraction rule the form. The world of movies is only one hundred years old, but criticism is starting to resemble that of literature in that canon formation is part and parcel of one's opinion. Japanese television drama, however, has been around for less than half that of movies, and, frankly, I don't think I have watched a single television drama that was produced before the year 1990. And yet my instincts for discriminating the great from the mediocre that I have cultivated from reading literature remains an unshakeable habit and faith.
I realized early in my efforts to appreciate Japanese television drama that, though literature and television drama are sister arts (in fact some dramas are so good they need to be read like literature, otherwise we will have no means to evaluate what we've just watched), Japanese television drama is a fairly new art form and chances are, it is an art form that isn't going to last (unlike literature and history). Since it is related to literature and yet isn't produced to last, it needs to be appreciated under a different standard. It is too young an art form to be appreciated according to tradition (unless one reads it the same way one reads literature). What differentiates it from literature though, to state the obvious, is that it consists of actual people (actors) and not representations of one. For me this is its most appealing trait. And so, therefore, I do not watch Japanese television drama strictly as an autonomous art form but for what it has to say about Japanese people, its culture and language.
There are some dramas that intend to describe the whole culture at once. These are the ambitious ones, and just by ambition alone rise above the rest whose intent is merely to present edifying stories. Every drama based on the novels written by Yamasaki Toyoko fall under this category. I would even go so far as to say that if you only watched three dramas, and made them KAREI NARU ICHIZOKU (2007 or 2021), UNMEI NO HITO (2012), and THE GREAT WHITE TOWER ~ SHIROI KYOTO (2004), you will have learned everything you need to know about the soul of Japanese culture from 1945 to the present. A big claim, I know, but they are that great. Each drama's canvas is large; each covers all classes of society, from the elite to the middle and working classes to the poor. Each is deeply moving. Each doesn't indulge in fantasy. Each presents a highly recognizable reality.
Those are the dramas I prefer to watch. But these kinds of dramas are few and far between. Furthermore, since appreciating the soul of Japan is my primary motive for watching Japanese television drama, I recognized long ago that I needed some other criteria for judgment outside of ambition and vastness of scale. I would probably put the 2013 drama WOMAN among my Top Ten favored dramas, and that was a "simple" story based on a mother's relationship with her two young children and her husband who is deceased.
I use the four patterns to first recognize and acknowledge what it is I am watching. A "Drama of the heart" has no desire to be large-scale. But by its very attention made to matters of the heart, and without recourse to sentimentality, the better dramas within this category get as close to describing the nature of Japanese culture that we're ever going to find outside our own intimate relationship with it. We can see this standard applied to Japanese literature too. American literary critics have tended to favor the large-scale and bombastic, those writers who can turn a phrase over those who wish to write simply and truthfully. Vladimir Nabokov's books are beloved by critics and common readers alike, not because his books are large-scale, but because his erudition and flamboyant prose style make it seem like he knew more than he did. If there's a book to be written about slavery, or the legacy of racism, the American critic and common reader will be virtually helpless in the face of its monumentality. The much maligned idea of "The Great American Novel" (one of the few ideas in American literary culture that genuinely excites me) exists only because the promise of vastness covering all remains a possibility. As far as I am aware, there is no Japanese novel remotely similar to Jack Kerouac's On The Road, a book about a man and his friends traveling the country from one end to the other under the assumption that a real America can be discovered and loved. My guess for why there isn't a Japanese impulse to write an On the Road is because it would be absurd for the Japanese writer to travel that far and wide to find the soul of his or her culture; it can be found in any one corner of the nation. (Basho may be the exception, however.) Kawabata's Snow Country remains beloved today, and for having no larger a scale than what is found in WOMAN. It is about a man and woman whose hard to define love affair takes place at a hot springs resort over the winters. That's all Kawabata needed to show. And the nation has rewarded him for it with their love.
I wouldn't say, however, that overall I am trying to transfer the Japanese literary standard to Japanese television drama. I have simply tried to identify the kinds of dramas being produced, and why some have affected me more than others. They do fall into recognizable patterns. And from these patterns I can see that the smaller scale dramas can have as great an impact, and with as much to say about the Japanese people, as Yamasaki's ones that move over a larger scale.