If you’ve watched Working!! (or Wagnaria if you want), then you know exactly what you’re getting into.
While the characters and their quirks are not recycled (thankfully), the same idea towards comedy and pacing still applies, only now it’s in an office instead of a restaurant. The premiere episode follows the first few days of the three new workers in the health and welfare section of the city office. Saya has never had a job before and has a hard time asserting herself, Hasebe is a slacker and a flirt who would rather collect phone numbers than do his job, and Yamagami (arguably the main character, since she gets most of the screentime) has taken the job to resolve a grudge against a civil service worker who allowed her parents to file her birth certificate with a ridiculous name.
I worked in a department secretary’s office in college, so the aspects of the episode that focused on dealing with the public were pretty funny to me. While the nuances were different, there seems to be a common thread in jobs where the people you’re helping feel like you’re wasting their time or won’t stop talking. That said, it’s not an in-joke series geared towards the working class; since the major characters are newbies, we get to experience their gradual realization that things are not going as smoothly as they would’ve hoped. The rest of the jokes revolve around Hasebe trying to get out of work and Yamagami’s revenge, which live or die on whether or not you like the characters.
It’s pretty obvious from the episode that this series is trying to recreate Working!!/Wagnaria‘s success, and that goes all the way down to the art style. I won’t be surprised if some of the characters from that series make a cameo here (in fact, it’s inevitable) since they would look perfectly fine side-by-side design wise. Yamagami even has her own ahoge that reflects her mood. However, it’s just as clear that Servant x Service wants to be able to stand on its own. In that way, I can see a lot of potential in this show. The OP is the best proof of this, which has one of the best blends of regular animation with CG I’ve ever seen alongside yet another earworm. If it plays its cards right, it could easily be one of the best series airing this season.
