Fuji TV’s New Dramas Spark Backlash — Nothing But Old-Timer Actors and Remakes

Background and Key Points

Fuji TV — nicknamed “Uji” (maggot) by critics online — has been Japan’s most-watched network for much of the 2000s and 2010s, home to landmark dramas like “Furuhata Ninzaburo” (1994-2006, starring the late Ken Yamazaki as a beloved detective), “Yamato Nadeshiko” (2000), and “Hero” starring Takuya Kimura. It’s also worth noting Fuji TV has been in real crisis mode since a 2024-2025 sexual misconduct scandal involving a former star host led to a mass advertiser boycott, which is the likely reason posters connect the network’s programming choices to sponsors “fleeing” and home-shopping ads filling commercial breaks — those slots are cheaper and don’t require brand-safety guarantees that spooked sponsors now avoid. FOD is Fuji TV’s in-house streaming service, and the network is reportedly promoting its back catalog there rather than commissioning new work.

The thread doesn’t converge on one villain. Some blame aging producers casting aging actors for an aging audience (a self-perpetuating loop one poster calls “very Japan”), others counter that Hollywood does exactly the same thing with endless franchise reboots, which shifts the debate from a Japan-specific failure to an industry-wide risk-aversion problem. A side argument breaks out over whether current stars even have the star power past leads did — one poster claims 1980s-90s celebrities like Sanma Akashiya had to be genuine A-listers to headline a drama, while today “anyone gets to star in one.”

What’s likely to be missed by non-Japanese readers: the posters treat the sponsor exodus and the creative stagnation as separate complaints, but they’re the same story — a network that lost advertiser trust after scandal is now cutting budgets by recycling IP instead of funding original productions, which is a much more mundane explanation than “running out of ideas.”