Having never seen the modestly popular animated series upon which it is based, I am perhaps not very highly qualified to review the live-action version of You're Under Arrest!: certainly, I can't offer any insight into whether or not the show is faithful to its animated origins. Then again, my relative unfamilarity with the Sailor Moon franchise has never stopped me from passing sometimes harsh judgement on the fascinatingly weird live-action version of that show, and anyway, I've always been a big believer in judging TV shows and movies and games on their own terms; even though I'm fairly certain in this case that they didn't, I honestly couldn't care less if the producers of the live-action You're Under Arrest! did betray some aspect of the manga or animated series, so long as they made it enjoyable.





And, they basically did. First aired on Japan's TV Asahi from October to December of 2002 (only nine forty-five minute episodes were made), You're Under Arrest! chronicled the adventures of two overzealous female traffic cops, Miyuki Kobayakawa (Sachie Hara) and Natsumi Tsujimoto (Misaki Itou, who later starred as Hitomi in Ju-On: The Grudge). The reckless duo have a tendency to stumble into dangerous situations and to insert themselves inelegantly into criminal investigations, which usually earns them an angry earful from their loud, overbearing, by-the-book section chief (the chief himself, to whom the section chief defers, is too smitten and amused by the pretty girls to discipline them very strongly). A totally clichéd set-up, but it works, mostly because it comes close to being played as pure parody: the girls are sent to the chief's office for punishment like five times in just this first episode, and always escape none the worse for wear.

Their first trip to the chief follows their foiling of an apparent robbery in the opening act, as they spot a mysterious van without a license plate while out on patrol. Sneaking into a nearby store, they spot a group of black-clad men holding up the joint and decide to let loose with some awkward, unconvincing martial arts (anemic kicks mixed with some good ol' fashioned in-real-life-that-never-would-have-connected punches). Unmasking the crooks, they are horrified to discover that they have been battling their fellow officers, who had been conducting some kind of training exercise.

So the section chief chews them out. The other female traffic cops, a nattering group of guy-crazy gossips, are likewise irritated, because they see Miyuki and Natsumi's recklessness as reflecting badly on the rest of them. Miyuki and Natsumi take this in stride, not really bothered by any of it...although Miyuki seems a bit upset that she was made a fool of in front of Ken Nakajima, the motorcycle-riding officer she has a sort-of crush on (Nakajima, for his part, has a full-blown crush on her, which eventually manifests itself in his following her to a bar when the female traffic cops arrange a goukon with some business dudes there). The episode spends a lot of time (understandably, considering that this is the first episode) on introductions: Miyuki and Natsumi meet Detective Ohkabayashi, an arrogant new arrival; Saori Saga, a mannerly new traffic cop; and Australian Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe, who inexplicably pops in for a pointless cameo that only serves to demonstrate Thorpe's awful Japanese skills and Natsumi's awful English skills to the audience.





Found amongst the various vignettes (the first episode has a thing for tangential scenes that don't really add anything to the story) is a plot involving a distraught teenage girl who unwisely confided in a sleazebag over the Internet. The sleazebag ended up informing her classmates of some of the unpleasant things she had written about them, which led everyone to hate her and to begin betting on when she would commit suicide as a result of their constant mistreatment. Miyuki and Natsumi, as friends of the girl's father (who runs the body shop the girls regularly frequent), eventually work to right this wrong. Compared to the comedic vignettes, this main plot is pretty dark, but the contrast between the two, oddly, is not really as jarring as it seems it should be. The story is generally well-told. (There is an annoying coincidence towards the end that belatedly justifies some questionable behavior on the part of Miyuki and Natsumi, but for some reason I found myself more bemused than upset at this bit of sloppy writing).

For a show evidently shot on the cheap, You're Under Arrest! manages to boast a professional look most of the time, and the presence of two bubbly, decidedly cute young women in police uniforms is almost always enough to distract from the handful of bad sets (I gather from my handy Anime Encyclopedia that this also had a lot to do with the success of the anime).

Overall, this is lightweight stuff -- often entertaining in weird, unexpected ways, but like so many of the shows I review here, not very substantive or nuanced. That said, it's really too bad You're Under Arrest! only ran for nine episodes -- as far as cheery, lightweight dramadies go, this is a pretty good one, with a modicum of real potential.

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