Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid Review — Found Family With Wings

Who should watch this? Anyone who has ever come home to an empty apartment and felt the silence. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid dresses itself as an absurd fantasy comedy — a drunken promise leaves an overworked programmer sharing her flat with Tohru, a dragon who insists on serving as her maid — but its 2017 heart is quieter than the premise suggests. This is a show about a solitary adult learning, with visible reluctance, to let her life be crowded.

The comedy earns its keep. Tohru's draconic solutions to household chores are reliably funny, and the arrival of Kanna — a small dragon with devastating deadpan — gives the ensemble its secret weapon; her school-life material is some of the warmest stuff in the whole thirteen episodes. But the moments I keep returning to are the small ones: Kobayashi staying a little later at the table, a holiday that matters because someone's there to share it. The show understands that domestic bliss isn't a punchline, it's a practice, and it lets its found family accumulate believably, episode by episode.

One honest complaint: a scattering of leering fanservice gags clash badly with the coziness, aimed at a different audience than the one the show's heart belongs to, and they date the series more than anything else in it. The first episode is free on the site — and it's an accurate promise of both the warmth and the wobble.