Ahare! Meisaku-kun ends its TV Tokyo run until January 2027

Ahare! Meisaku-kun has a finish line and a restart date. The five-minute school comedy ends its late-night run on TV Tokyo on Sunday 27 September, and the production staff say new episodes arrive in January 2027.

The late-night slot closes on 27 September

TV Tokyo’s own page for the show carries the notice in its first line: the next broadcast, on 27 September, is the final episode. The series currently airs on Sundays at 24:45, which in practice means just before one in the morning on Monday. This run of shorts began on 5 July.

October’s episodes are reruns in a family slot

Nothing disappears in the meantime. From 4 October the show joins Ani Mori!, the broadcaster’s Sunday-morning anime block, at 07:00 — and the block’s own listing is honest about what it is showing, describing the run as an encore of episodes that aired at a different time in the July season. The same shorts, moved from after midnight to before breakfast.

New episodes are pencilled in for January 2027

The staff announced on Tuesday 22 September that the anime will receive more episodes in January 2027, with the repeats filling the gap until then. That is a plan rather than a transmission date: no channel, timeslot or episode count has been attached to the January run yet, and the current series has not yet signed off.

An eleven-year-old show that keeps finding a way back

The franchise has form. It began in April 2016 as a strand inside NHK Educational TV’s Beat World and ran for 39 five-minute episodes, then reached a global audience in November 2020 when AnimeLog put it on its YouTube channel. When the next season needed paying for, the audience did it: a crowdfunding campaign in April 2022 raised ¥19,938,500 — about US$145,800 — and hit its target on the day it opened, with that season arriving that August. Taketo Shinkai directs, JUN OSON designs the characters and Pie in the sky animates. The theme song, Nonsense Nonsense, is by Frederic.

Our opinion

A January date is a promise about a show, not a schedule, and the honest reading of Ahare! Meisaku-kun is that affection has been paying its bills for a decade. It has been crowdfunded once, archived once and is now being moved from midnight into a rerun block on Sunday morning, which is what a broadcaster does with something it likes but cannot find room for. The instructive part is the shape of the thing: five minutes is short enough that a season can be funded by its fans and long enough that a repeat slot can carry it for three months without losing anybody. If the new episodes do turn up in January, they will turn up because the audience kept the lights on — not because a scheduling committee decided the show mattered.