The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Tamon's B-Side

High schooler Utage Kinoshita works part-time as a housekeeper so she can afford her fangirl obsession with Tamon Fukuhara, her favorite member of the boy band F/ACE. When work serendipitously sends her to the home of her idol, she discovers that the real Tamon couldn't be more different from his wild and sexy onstage persona.

Tamon’s B-Side is based on a manga series of the same name by Yuki Shiwasu. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

I chuckled, I groaned, I hid my face in secondhand embarrassment. Yup, the adaptation of Tamon’s B-Side seems to be going well! Equal parts a lampooning of the idol genre and a story about the faces we put on for others' benefit, this first episode manages to be a pastiche of genre trappings that largely works, mostly because it gives the impression of being completely self-aware. From Utage's laments that she's being a bad fan to Tamon's intense anxiety juxtaposed with his smarmy stage self, this is whiplash-quick with its gags – and that largely works for it.

The piece of the story that I both love and feel conflicted about is Tamon himself. While I don't doubt that he always wanted to be an idol of some sort, it also feels very clear that he wasn't thinking about being this guy. Idol Tamon, center of boy band F/ACE (or “eff ace,” as Utage's dad says, which is 100% how my dad would pronounce it), is self-assuredly sexy, spouting cringey lines designed to appeal to teen and pre-teen girls while sparkling like a YA vampire. But real Tamon is riddled with anxiety, has the self-esteem of a garden slug, and can barely get out of his own way. That someone in his past – presumably someone high up in his agency – told him that his real personality wasn't needed likely only compounded the problem. In a real-world sense, this poor man needs serious therapy. In animeland, he just needs a sixteen-year-old superfan filling in for his regular housekeeper.

That's fine (we wouldn't have a plot else), but I'm not always comfortable with the gags about Tamon's mental health. That's certainly me taking things too seriously, as the later parts of the episode show; Tamon recognizes that Utage is a good friend to him despite also being his fan and that she helps him to center himself. It's possible for that to coexist with jokes about how she's made him go from feeling like excrement to feeling like household waste. It just…isn't always handled with as much sensitivity as I might like.

But I enjoyed this episode anyway. It is absolutely pitch perfect when it's making fun of series like UtaPri of IDOLiSH7, which take a very earnest approach to the cheese of idols, from F/ACE's performances to their banter. (I love the one member who just says his name and nothing else.) The abrupt shift into CG for the dancing isn't great, nor is the fact that Ori's name is spelled both “Ori” and “Ouri” in the subtitles; for the record, Viz's release of the manga uses “Ori.” There's a sweet and silly story here, and I've been enjoying the manga, so I'm looking forward to seeing more…and hoping that the subtitles figure out how to spell everyone's names consistently.

It's funny, when I started writing this entry originally, I was going to call this show a nothing-burger. It didn't do anything offensive nor did it do anything particularly enduring. It was just kind of there from beginning to end—and the situation at the core of both the plot and the humor felt too unrealistic to really connect with. And then, suddenly, in retrospect, it did.

What missed at first is that the hyperbolic humor of Tamon's B Side is overshadowing something more. People have different sides to themselves when performing, but someone suddenly becoming a shell-shocked, panic-ridden mess unable to trust in the love of his fans seemed a bit too far to be anything but an outlandish joke. However, beneath that, the core of Tamon's struggle is 100% true-to-life—especially in Japan.

The fear of not knowing when people are just being polite and when they are showing their true feelings is a real one. I learned this the hard way. Years ago, back when I was an English teacher for adults, one of my favorite students went from being all-smiles in class to complaining to my boss immediately after. I was completely blindsided by this and it threw me into a spiral similar to Tamon's. I was always wondering which students were actually enjoying my class and which were faking it. How many of the people smiling at me secretly hated me? It really messed me up.

It took some major life changes like moving across the country and a change of jobs before I fully regained my confidence. But you know what helped even more? Friends that could understand what I was going through—most notably some of my former students. Their support and insight—and a few self-esteem-boosting talks—are what got me through it.

And that is exactly what Utage is doing for Tamon. She, in her position as a fan who knows him on both a professional and personal level, is able to let him know that she isn't disappointed in him—that she doesn't see him as a fake. And if that's true for her, it might just be true for all this other fans as well.

In the end, I feel if you both enjoy the show's humor and have had a similar experience to Tamon in your own life—and can connect with him on that level—this anime might just be worth watching.

Are any of my Doppo girlies out there? It's been years since we last got a Hypnosis Mic anime, but the world's most pathetic salaryman rapper still rules my heart. I haven't given up on someday getting a continuation, but until then Tamon of Tamon’s B-Side will be an excellent substitute.

I probably would never listen to F/ACE of my own volition. I've never cared for boy band music, not even when I was in the target audience as Backstreet Boys and 'NSYNC fans were having turf wars. I find idol personalities unbearably fake and cheesy. Part of the charm of Tamon’s B-Side, in fact, comes from the way that it plays up those qualities, pushing them over the edge into parody as I nod along. Why yes, I'm sure it is true that their stage personas bear little resemblance to who they are in their private lives! The pressure of sublimating your true self so completely would do a number on a person psychologically. I'm not as stridently anti as I once was, but I still regard the whole industry with general suspicion.

But Not Your Idol this isn't. It's not a scathing indictment of the idol music industry, but a surprisingly complex examination of the relationship between the idol persona, the person behind the mask, and their fans. Normally there's a boundary between the performer and the fan that must never be crossed. Getting to know Tamon's gloomy side and forming a bond with him means that whether she meant to or not, Utage has transgressed that boundary and can never go back to how it was. Can she hold her image of the character he plays, who she adores so completely, while also getting to know the man? It's genuinely thoughtful, while depicting Utage's worship of Tamon with such utter sincerity that I felt it in my heart when she burst into tears at his concert.

All of this is dressed up in one of the sillier shojo comedies of the last few years, with perfect comedic timing thanks to director Chika Nagaoka. Saori Hayami, who I usually associate with gentle, soft-spoken characters, plays wildly against type as Utage and is genuinely hilarious, while fresh-faced newbie Kakeru Hatano reminds of a young Mamoru Miyano as Tamon. The two have to carry the entire episode, since the vast majority of the episode's runtime is spent on just their characters, and their comic chemistry keeps things from dragging at any point.

You never know what kind of production you'll get from J.C. Staff these days; after the unmitigated disaster of One Punch Man's third season, I never would have expected them to expend the resources for a brightly-colored, well-directed shoujo romantic comedy. And yet, Tamon’s B-Side comes roaring in here. Most impressive is the camerawork during F/ACE's performance; while I'll probably always prefer hand-drawn animation to CG rigs for dancing, Nagaoka makes fantastic use of the capabilities of computers to render a three-dimensional space, keeping the camera dynamic and in constant motion but still highlighting the characters' dance moves. Even if I didn't love the music, I couldn't help admiring the technical mastery at work.

In a crowded season, Tamon’s B-Side is an early contender for the best new show. At the very least, it will be one of the most fun.

Tamon’s B-Side starts off with an advantage given its killer rom-com premise: Utage is a superfan of the boy band F/ACE, and fate conspires to make her the housekeeper of ultra hottie F/ACE member Tamon…except, it turns out that his neurotic and anxiety-ridden personality is the exact opposite of the smooth, confident pop-star adored by fans all over Japan. I'll give you all just one guess at the “shocking” discovery she is going to happen when she gets closer to the other members of the band.

Crucially, this is a romantic comedy that puts equal weight on the “romance” and the “comedy” halves of the equation (and you could easily argue that the laughs outweigh the kirakira love-sparkles, here). This is important because every character in this show is a ridiculous and exaggerated caricature of personality disorders. Utage's obsessive and stubborn dedication to her failboy idol group is the source of most of the jokes here, which helps put her on more even footing with the likes of poor Tamon, who seems one bad day away from a Howard Hughes-esque pissing-in-all-of-the-milk-bottles meltdown. In other words, this is one of those shows that lets you laugh with the characters even as we're also laughing at them, which prevents any of the bits from coming across as mean-spirited.

More importantly, there's just enough humanity in this story to make sure that everyone doesn't completely devolve into zany sketch-comedy routines given horrifying Frankensteinian life. Utage is a crazy dork, but she's a likeable crazy dork. Tamon is a trainwreck of paranoia and self-doubt, but you still want to root for the guy as much as Utage does. My favorite jokes involve the ways that Tamon is able to flip his switch back to “Professional Sex Magnet” mode when he has to perform, or if Utage happens to feed him a single scrap of delicious fried chicken.

Speaking of performance, there's the whole idol-anime aspect of the show to contend with too, though that is admittedly my least favorite part of the show. I need my East Asian pop music to have a little bit of edge to it, and F/ACE's music and dance routines have all the grit of pudding cup. The more hip-hop themed ending theme is stronger than the main performance of the episode, however, so maybe F/ACE will be able to deliver some more impressive tunes in the future. If this were just an anime about cute idol boys, that might be more of a deal breaker for me, but thankfully Tamon’s B-Side has enough humor and charm to keep me invested, even if I might decide to just fast-forward through any of the concert scenes from here on out.