I recently finished the second episode of the currenly-airing My Clueless First Friend anime. This series, set in a fifth grade classroom, features a lonely, bullied girl, Akane Nishimura, and the transfer student who very enthusiastically befriends her, Taiyou Taikada. The second episode struck me because of its rapid-fire short format. Many of these sorts of comedies/school relationship stories feature episodes broken into distinct stories. For example, the early seasons of my top two anime series of 2022, Teasing Master Takagi-san and Kaguya-sama: Love is War almost always broke episodes into three separate (sometimes connected) skits. However, I lost track of the number of small story snippets in the second episode of My Clueless First Friend, and some ended almost as soon as they began.
While my praise for Takagi-san and Kaguya-sama establishes that I have no inherent issue with breaking anime episodes into distinct skits, My Clueless First Friend has some attention span issues. Episode two was too aggressive in jumping from story to story. Some of the stories ended before we could reach the punchline. Another issue with its format is that the skits began to feel repetitive. Every skit involves Taiyou being very friendly toward Akane and eventually causing her to blush. Even the early seasons of Takagi and Kaguya had a bit more variety. I think there is a good series somewhere in here, but like Taiyou, My Clueless First Friend needs to settle down a little bit.