School and Youth Drama

GTO in 1998, Gokusen in 2002, Dragon Zakura in 2005. Line up this band's representative titles and one thing they share comes out — all three began as manga. Where the previous generation of teacher dramas (→ The Teacher Drama) brought social problems in through original scripts, this generation moved to television stories that had already found their audience in boys' and young men's magazines. The unorthodox teacher who saves the students was a form polished first inside manga. The numbers are there too. GTO averaged 28.5%, with a final episode of 35.7% (Video Research, Kanto region, household). The current by which manga adaptations became the mainstream of the Japanese serial is plainly visible here. The ground in which Japanese screenwriters would come to say that adapting an existing work is the ultimate act of derivative creation (→ The Age of the Screenwriter) is in this band as well.