Alternative title(s): Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu mama.
Manga Adaptation by LIDENFILMS
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Hell is cute. Miss Beelzebub, the ruler of hell, is also cute. She and the other people in hell have cute adventures, that also happen to involve a lot of shots of cleavage and copious nudity.

Euri’s verdict: Cute. Sleazy. Bizarre. Not great.

This show is quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, though unfortunately that doesn’t mean it’s good either. It’s a bizarre mixture of sickeningly cute pastel colours, fluffy creatures and soft things, with a splash of excessive nudity and a big focus on Beelzebub’s cleavage. In it’s component parts, Miss Beelzebub is most certainly nothing new, but thrown together, it makes for unrelatable, utterly bizarre viewing.

After the cutesy intro, we get a very quick explanation of how hell functions in this universe, and why it’s unlike what we typically picture hell to be. At this point, with a narrator chiming in to explain a thing or two, it felt a little like Cells at Work!, in that we were being given an inside look at how something operates. It doesn’t quite stick with that vibe throughout the episode, and to its credit does a fairly decent job of showing us just who Beelzebub and her easily-embarrassed assistant Mullin in a way that Cells didn’t, and didn’t need to.

For what it’s worth, the cutesy stuff in this show is completely fine. Watching Beelzebub doing cute things is, in fact, cute, and that would be fine by itself, though somewhat lacking. However, the show appears to be placing a large focus on Beelzebub’s chest and her nudey sleeping habits, and man, what a bummer. It feels almost unnatural that the show goes there to as it clashes incredibly with the show’s aesthetic, to the point where I was actively questioning my own opinions of it. It’s not the most egregious example of it by any stretch, even if they do show off far more skin that I would expect they could get away with, but it’s hard not to wonder what the show might be like were it using those instances to push the comedy forward.

That’s really the biggest disappointment of the show, because even with all this skin of display, you can see what the show could be. There are certainly fun moments, but they’re moments that don’t get used as well as they possibly could due to the show throwing in another slow pan from Beelzebub’s chest to her face. At the same time, if you’re somehow not sick of the show doing this, I can easily see Miss Beelzebub landing well with a lot of people. I hesitate to say this is in the show’s credit, but at the very least the nudity is handled in a way that embarrasses the guy, not the girl. Her indifference to it all is, frustratingly, reassuring when we’ve already reviewed shows full of groping, assault and even rape. It’s sad that such a thing is reassuring, but here we are.

Ultimately it’s not a show I would recommend, but you can certainly do a lot worse this season. I wanted to like this show, but even if you cut away all the sleaze you’d still be left with something cute but insubstantial.