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The story
Fuji TV’s summer dramas have all sunk to ratings in the 2% range, with even a drama starring Yuki Uchida and the revival of “GTO” failing to turn the numbers around, according to reports.
On 5channel, users debated the reasons behind the ongoing exodus from television, how today’s drama production compares in quality to the hits of years past, and the culture within Fuji TV itself.
Summer dramas all flop — Fuji TV’s crisis that even 50-something beauty Yuki Uchida or a GTO revival can’t save
You can practically hear the death throes echoing out of Odaiba.
Fuji TV’s dismal state is the talk of every network’s programming and production circles. It’s been a year and a half since the Nakai Masahiro scandal, and at Fuji Media Holdings’ shareholder meeting this past June, the company had just announced improved earnings…
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Exactly this.
Especially young people.
Lol, morons who brag about not watching TV but are still obsessed with everything TV-related.
Has been #1 overall on TVer for 5 weeks straight
TVer Overall Ranking #1
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@TVer_official
Thu 7/30 #TVerDailyRanking
🥇 #TokyoMidosa (nickname for "Tokyo Middle 30")
🥈 #WednesdayDowntown
🥉 #VIVANT
4⃣ #FirstCry
5⃣ #GreatChase
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TVer Ranking
#1 Overall
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#1 overall, baby!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPml2YUa8AEyK8K.jpg
Middle-aged and older viewers are drifting away from TV hard too these days.
They probably cast Yuki Uchida as the lead betting her generation would still watch terrestrial dramas, but that bet totally missed.
Isn't the morning drama (asadora) doing better than the Taiga?
This season too — the Toyotomi-themed Taiga < "Kaze Kaoru" (the asadora).
I doubt they can actually collect money from Nakai, but he'll go down in history as the guy who took down a media giant like Fuji TV with a single act of sexual violence.
Sounds like [former] president Minato and other execs are the ones being billed 5 billion yen by Fuji TV. Kind of makes you wish they'd gone after Nakai instead.
I think [screenwriter] Yukawa did write it well, but honestly I wanted Onizuka to go full wrecking ball on the "school" itself lol. It's a drama — you can go as crazy as you want.
The '98 version had Onizuka's wild side, and the student cast was on a whole different level compared to now. The source material, script, and direction all came together, and that's how it hit over 30% ratings at its peak.
And on top of that, they shot themselves in the foot with the Jiro Sato scandal.
Apparently [writer] Osamu Suzuki came up with the "101st Proposal" sequel after watching Top Gun — GTO's probably the same kind of thing.
And yet there's still no anime in primetime.
The "Men Who Can't Get Married" sequel also ended in disaster…
Though reviving old shows isn't inherently a bad move.
After all, the Dragon Zakura sequel — another Hiroshi Abe drama — was a hit.
Both "Men Who Can't Get Married" and Dragon Zakura were good though.
That reminds me, I want to see Sakai's Legal High again. Give us season 3 already.
Sankei Shimbun is still hanging in there in Okinawa, but it's not contributing to profits.
Back in the "if it's not fun" era it actually was fun. At some point TV as a whole just became boring.
Nah, for me it'd be Kaoru Yachigusa for actresses and Ken Takakura for actors.
Korean and Chinese dramas just look more beautiful. Japanese dramas are so gloomy and dark they're hard to watch.
Nobody knew what would sell back then either. It's just that everyone's become the type to shoot ideas down immediately, so they've lost the ability to make something they actually believe in.
The core of the production side genuinely thinks they're overflowing with talent and making incredibly interesting stuff. You can tell they're deluded if you saw the video the screenwriters posted and quickly deleted during the "Sexy Tanaka-san" controversy.
Background and Key Points
Fuji TV has been in freefall since January 2025, when a scandal involving star host Nakai Masahiro—accused of a sexual assault the network was later found to have known about and mishandled—triggered advertiser boycotts, a management shakeup, and the resignation of president Koichi Minato. In Japan, terrestrial drama ratings are household viewership percentages tracked by Video Research; a 2% rating for a primetime drama is a historic low, especially for a network that once dominated the 1990s-2000s “trendy drama” era. GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka), the 1998 series about a delinquent-turned-teacher, was a cultural phenomenon that hit over 30% ratings at its peak, making its revival a symbolic test of whether Fuji can still produce a hit.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t “is TV dying”—posters mostly agree it is—but whether the failure is structural (audiences fleeing to streaming/TVer, an aging fanbase that no longer watches broadcast) or self-inflicted (a sanitized, toothless GTO reboot, recycled 20-year-old franchises like Bayside Shakedown, and a production culture posters accuse of self-satisfied complacency, referencing a leaked video from writers during an unrelated scriptwriter controversy).
What outsiders likely miss is TVer, Japan’s free ad-supported catch-up streaming platform: several of these “flop” dramas are actually topping TVer’s daily rankings, meaning viewership hasn’t vanished so much as migrated off the household-ratings metric entirely—a nuance the posters raise but the headline obscures. Also unmentioned in the thread is that Fuji’s parent, Fuji Media Holdings, is separately dealing with real-estate divestitures (Sankei Building) unrelated to the drama slump, muddying how much of the crisis is content versus corporate.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[TV] Ratings in the 2% range everywhere… Summer dramas all flop — Fuji TV’s crisis that even 50-something “Yuki Uchida”‘s beauty or the “GTO” revival can’t save“.
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