TV worth watching: Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia’s Case Files

Bookshop proprietor Shioriko Shinokawa (Ayame Goriki) and her partners in deduction Hajime Shida (Katsumi Takahashi) and Daisuke Goura (Akira). Image © 2013 Fuji Television Network. tl;dr: Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia’s Case Files is TV comfort food for the holidays, a cozy Japanese mystery series with a bookish heroine. I’m still watching a fair amount of anime, but recently decided to use my Crunchyroll subscription to check out a Japanese dramatic series instead. Four days and eleven episodes later I’ve just finished up the first and only (thus far) season of Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia’s Case Files (ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖, Biblia Koshodou no Jiken Techou), a series featuring a demure young proprietor of a used bookstore who uses her encyclopedic knowledge of books and book selling to solve a variety of (mostly) minor domestic mysteries. It’s relatively slight but entertaining, the perfect thing to watch over the holidays when you want to relax and enjoy something that won’t spoil your digestion. ...

2014-11-27 · 5 min · Frank Hecker

TV worth watching: Manhattan

Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) and Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zuckerman), physicist protagonists of the WGN America television series Manhattan tl;dr: Manhattan is a quality TV show about the people racing to build an atomic bomb, and their families. It’s well worth watching, but you’ll enjoy it more if you remember you’re not tuned to the History Channel. ...

2014-10-19 · 8 min · Frank Hecker