I watched this at a time when I was laid up with a serious illness, and I loved how comforting it was to care about these misfit characters for a while. My Japanese comprehension is rudimentary, but the subtitles helped a lot, and didn't take away from my enjoyment of the acting. It has a sly class consciousness that Westerners can identify, if they're open minded. But there's plenty of cute and homey stuff too so there's no sense of preachiness to me. I hope the NHK series was successful enough that they will continue to bring the manga to video.