10 Great TV Shows Made From STUPID Ideas

9. One Punch Man

aggretsuko show
Madhouse

If web comic extraordinaire "ONE" hadn't proven this story about a superhero who wins every fight with just a single punch was a hit with its original web comic version, and subsequent redraw by Yusuke Murata, no TV producer in their right mind would greenlight it.

A common mantra repeated in EVERY writing class is that your hero MUST struggle to defeat their opponent in some way shape or form. Otherwise the audience gets bored because, well, what's there to be worried about if the hero can defeat a city destroying monster in one punch?

But One Punch Man didn't just pull it off, it pulled it off with flying colors. Even when it switched studios between seasons and lost a LOT of the animation that made season 1 such a blast, its biting satire of superhero movies/comics, sentai heroes, shonen anime, Japanese society and its pathological need to turn EVERYTHING into an ineffectual bureaucratic nightmare still shines through via it's insanely clever writing.

No one would have predicted that a show like this would take off like it has, but that's the best kind of show in this author's humble opinion.

In this post: 
Aggretsuko
 
First Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?