Parents' Guide to Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman

Like Kantaro himself, this show is so invested in desserts that it's nearly impossible not to be won over. Whenever Kantaro visits a restaurant (all of them real places in Tokyo), he goes in-depth on what makes the dessert great, describing the preparation, ingredients, and finally, the actual tasting. The show uses a wide variety of techniques to make each of Kantaro's descriptions a rich visual experience. Ingredients are shown in beautiful close-ups, and Kantaro often has extreme emotional reactions to them. Each dessert sends Kantaro into such a reverie that he hallucinates himself becoming one of the ingredients: When he eats melon kikagori, he becomes a melon-man, dancing with his melon-bride; peach parfait inspires a vision where he is reborn from a peach, only to engage one of his co-workers in a battle to see who can do the most squats.

As the show evolves, the workplace half of the setup gets more intriguing as well, with Kantaro having to evade co-workers that have decided to follow him on his sales route or have discovered his dessert blog. Slowly, Kantaro becomes a deeper character than he appears to be early on: He's a man who has built not only his job, but his entire worldview around sweets, but over time, he becomes more empathetic for other people and their own passions. The fact that Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman can build that level of drama around what's essentially a Food Network-type tourism show makes it even more astounding.