Kannawa-san is the star employee at the PR Department of an unnamed Tokyo company where hair underlights are apparently a mandatory part of the dress code. The very definition of an unapproachable “cool beauty,” each day she strides into the office with her no-nonsense attitude and proceeds to plow through her own work (and pick up the slack for more than a few of her coworkers) with perfect composure, skill, and efficiency. It’s no wonder that she was picked to train the department’s top new recruit. There’s just one teensy weensy little problem: She’s not actually an “ice queen,” she’s just really socially awkward. Throughout the episode, we see her try her hardest to be the ideal mentor, but all the self-imposed pressure only causes her to trip herself up. Her attempts at firm but friendly instruction come across like brusque commands from a bullheaded boss straight out of the 1980s. She gets hung up for so long on the question of whether it’s proper mentor behavior or outdated power harassment to invite her mentee to eat lunch with her that he ends up just eating by himself. She stays up so late reading “How To Mentor” books that she barely makes it to work on time. She can’t even exchange business cards with the new guy properly. If only she could be like the friendly, capable senpai who taught her when she was a new hire, she laments alone at a diner. But despite it all, the new guy Kanegawa-san doesn’t seem to mind, and even politely tells off a couple of other employees when he hears them trashing her personality behind her back (yes, their names are similar—I’m waiting for the gag where someone accidentally calls her by his surname and it puts our leading lady down for the count). Maybe these two will make a better team than they first appear to…

Man, I should have gotten a salaryman job in Japan instead of going the English teacher route, because Japan Inc. is apparently chock-full of marriage-material mentors. Kidding aside, I’m not a huge fan of workplace romantic comedies because most of the time I find them to be just high school romantic comedies dressed in business casual. That, and alcohol-based jokes are legal since the characters are all of drinking age. But this one was fine. It was exactly what it said on the can, but it was fine. All the expected plot beats are there. The animation is decent but unremarkable aside from a little extra work on the character designs. The OP and ED are also exactly what you’d expect, with the former being an upbeat tune that sees our two leads acting equal parts cute and awkward as they go through their daily work routine, and the latter being a more relaxed “wind down” song set to still frames which show off more of the series’ cast. Besides a couple of split-second cuts of fanservice that are more eye-rolling than anything (it is apparently crucial that we know that a bookshelf is butt—um, waist-high) there’s nothing that I can call out as objectionable. So the question is whether or not you like this kind of fast food anime. I might give another episode or two a try just to see if an interesting cast dynamic develops, but I also don’t think this is a series I’ll regret keeping on the Low Priority list.

My Awkward Senpai is streaming on Crunchyroll.