Review of A Couple of Cuckoos
SWEET HOME JAPALABAMA!! The premise to “A Couple of Cuckoos” is simple. Nagi, a gloomy, honour student with no friends and a mean right hook who comes from a poor family discovers he was swapped at birth with Erika, a beautiful, semi-famous and kinda stupid influencer with no friends who comes from a rich family. Their parents decide to arrange for them to be married as a way of solving that slight mix up so they can be both sets of parents children. However, this doesn’t sit well with Nagi because he only has eyes for Segawa, a beautiful, over-competitive honour student at his school, andit doesn’t sit well with Erika as she's fiercely “independent” and hates having decisions made for her. It also doesn’t sit well with Nagi’s bratty little sister Sachi either, who kind of likes the thought of her brother not being her brother at all for harem anime reasons that you can probably guess if your brain has been poisoned enough. Did you get all that? Good.
Although the show uses a lot of old harem tropes such as accidental boob grabs, the main couple forced to live together, prolonged will they won’t they moments interrupted by coincidental accidents, etc, etc, it’s surprisingly entertaining. This is definitely down to the extremely likeable core cast of characters, who have strong, memorable personalities and character chemistry, so the story is able to mix and match between the four whenever and comedy will ensue.
Despite how safe the show feels as a harem rom-com there are enough subversions to make it stand out from it’s trashy peers. The cast is small so we spend a lot of time getting to know them as people instead of having a new, shallowly produced girl being awkwardly squeezed into the harem every other week to try and shake things up, there’s an actual, real love confession made by episode 4, Nagi has an actual personality and although he’s not good with women he’s not a wimp who can’t stand up for himself or speak his mind, although the fan service is still present it’s usually Nagi doing the accidental stripping and I like the mascot they use to censor his peep-peep, and the show is actually laugh out loud funny which if you’ve watch a lot of harem rom-coms you’d know is rare. Segawa became one of my favourite characters very quickly.
It’s not perfect as a show though. The animation is fine, but it could be better, and I do not like Shion, the forced, male “best friend” side role who I actually think I’m supposed to dislike as part of that subversion I was talking about, but his vibe ends up clashing with the core cast too much and it’s annoying. I also think the actual romance is a bit too slow and meandering at points. There are some moments between Nagi and one of the three love interests which feel distractingly forced and it can really takes you out of a scenes believability, but when it does get those moments right the show can be surprisingly sweet.
“A Couple of Cuckoos” is totally ludicrous even for a slice-of-life harem anime, but if gotta admit, it’s very enjoyable. A real “Romeo and Juliet” story once you’ve take two steps backwards and asked yourself “What the fuck?…”.
I was a bit worried that this would be the anime equivalent of a southern-American mouth-breather and admittedly it felt that way a few times, but not enough to stop me from watching and enjoying this very silly yet, very fun harem show.
7/10 Good.