Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Angel Flight’ On Prime Video, A Tonally-Strange Japanese Dramedy About A Service That Repatriates Dead People

We like shows with heavy drama and light comedy, as well as shows with heavy comedy and a little bit of drama. But shows with heavy comedy and heavy drama? They might be a little strange, like a new Japanese series on Prime Video shows.

Opening Shot: Shots of “Happy Land”, a shanty town neighborhood in Manila.

The Gist: A young man chases a group of gang members through the shanty town after they steal his wallet. His friends help him out, but the man still gets beaten so severely that he dies from his injuries.

Back in Tokyo, we see a young woman named Rinko Takaki (Honoko Matsumoto) trying to write a note to her mom about finding the right place for her as she walks down a corridor at the airport. She works for Angel Hearse, a company that repatriates bodies, whether it’s Japanese nationals who die overseas or other countries’ citizens that die in Japan. As the president, Nami Izawa (Ryoko Yonekura), says, they “bring their souls home.”

Rinko isn’t so sure about this gig; she calls the chairman, Kashiwagi (Kenichi Endo) a thug that reminds her of a member of yakuza, or the Japanese mafia. He’s more concerned with efficiency and making money, but Nami, as fake as Rink thinks she is, is absolutely concerned with getting these people back to their families.

The parents of the young man killed in Manila hire Angel Hearse to bring him home; he left for Manila four years prior and told his parents “I’m not coming back.” His father, a famous architect, has pretty much disowned him, and can’t stand to see his son’s bruised and beaten body in the morgue. But when the body disappears, Kashigawi orders Rinko, who speaks English, to go with Nami to get the body.

The first thing they have to do is convince the parents to have their son brought back to Japan. As far as his father knows, their sun joined a gang in Manila and didn’t want to have anything to do with their family. But Nami is determined to get the young man home, going as far as to challenge the gang members in Happy Land to show them where they brought the body. Then she begs. But, despite the language barrier and abject fear, she gets through to the gang members.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If you crossed Six Feet Under with Touched By An Angel and The Office, you get Angel Flight.

Our Take: We’ll just come right out and say it: Angel Flight is a bit of a strange bird of a show. It’s not the subject matter, though; we’re intrigued by the idea of what’s basically an airport mortuary that has to retrieve bodies and bring them back to their families in viewable condition. Each episode will have a new story, and the tone of those stories will vary; the folks at Angel Hearse will deal with a mass killing as well as a dead starlet.

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But it’s that tonal shift that makes us wonder about this show. It’s not just a shift from episode to episode, though; there are shifts within the episode. In the scenes in the office, Nami goofs on Rinko, who also calls out Kashigawi for his constant harassment. The rest of the crew have their specialties and are way enthusiastic for the job.

When they get to a site, though, we see the real purpose of the series; to show Nami’s dedication to reuniting the dead with their families. This is where the show, and Yonekura, shines. We learn that Yonekura has suffered some deep personal trauma to view her job a certain way, and when we find out what that trauma is, we want to know more about it. And when Yonekura has to shift from being an annoying boss to someone who is deeply connected to the people she’s trying to help, her performance also shifts from slapsticky to subtle and powerful.

The hope is that as the group at Angel Hearse travel around the world to repatriate their clients’ loved ones, more details about Nami, Rinko and some of the others will be revealed.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: We see Nami sleeping on her couch, a ring that a loved one made hanging on a chain around her neck. A very subtle but powerful way to show what she’s lost.

Sleeper Star: Matsumoto’s character Rinko makes for a good foil for Nami, and we’ll see if they bond a bit more as they work together.

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s harassment, and then there’s this line Kashiwagi says to Rinko: “Why don’t you wear a skirt, the super tight kind, to make your butt stand out?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re intrigued by the “body of the week” stories that Angel Flight promises to tell (a preview of the remaining episodes is at the end of the first hour). Hopefully, the tone will even out a bit as the characters are better defined.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.