The Trendy Drama
In the late 1980s there was a period when Tokyo itself became the set. Fashionable jobs, bright apartments, conversation in restaurants. Before the substance of the story, these dramas showed how a life could look.
Fuji TV began placing dramas in the Monday 9 p.m. slot in April 1987. This band starts there, and in the next section (→ Getsu-9 Romance) it goes as far as the point where the name of a slot becomes the name of a genre.
In the sense that it turned the mood of its time straight into a product, this band wears the face of that era more honestly than any other.
⚠️This band has not yet been through verification against the ledger. It will be thickened once the titles, years, and numbers are confirmed.
The myth, corrected
The trendy drama began in Fuji TV's Monday-nine slot
It is true that Monday at nine became the face of this mood. But the title most often named as the starting point, Danjo 7-nin Natsu Monogatari (1986), was not Fuji at all: it was TBS, on Friday at nine. Fuji brought drama back to Monday at nine in April 1987, and that slot's first title, Announcer Puttsun Monogatari, was still an industry story. Monday-nine swings toward the trendy side only with Kimi no Hitomi wo Taiho Suru! in January 1988. And Dakishimetai! (1988) was not Monday-nine either: it ran on the Thursday ten o'clock slot, National Thursday Theatre. While we are here: Thursday Theatre is a ten o'clock slot, not a nine o'clock one, and it began in October 1984. The name travelled faster than the schedule, and the memory of the slot was pulled along after it.