I watched this because of the word "zombie", but the title is lying. It's set in the afterlife, so everyone's dead and some people choose to call themselves zombies, but they're sentient, chatty and great dancers. Ten "zombies" are played by THE JET BOY BANGERZ, a boy band whose main job here is dancing for the end credits. Seriously, that was my favourite thing about the show. I always looked forward to seeing the guest stars joining in with the end credits dance, sometimes dorkily and always lovably.

The show's formula goes as follows... Two guest stars appear in an undead classroom. They haven't realised they're dead and they've got stuff to discuss. Also, they've got to choose whether or not to go to hell.

There's a regular cast. The ten zombies are a sort of Greek chorus and they work quite well. My favourite was the camp gay one called Python, played by Mark Aeron. More important, though, are Yagi Masayasu as Beef (grim, humourless) and Maeda Kentaro as Mouse (smug, sadistic and obviously the show's best character). They're all named after the twelve animals in the Chinese zodiac. I have no explanation for the big eyeball on a TV screen, though.

The point of the show is its two-handers with the guest stars. (The last episode ditches the formula and focuses on the regulars, but this isn't too successful.) I'm reminded of Death Parade, a 2015 anime with a similar premise and an even more banging title sequence. We meet a broad range of visitors. There's a married couple where the husband wants the wife to shut up and do what he says. A scary actor argues with his agent and made me wonder if he was a yakuza, but then a later episode gives us actual yakuza instead.

We see some impressive actors. Naoto Takenaka's in the opening episode. Uchida Chika and Kagei Hina are also great in Episode 7 as two women in love with the same man. The only episodes I wasn't keen on were 10 (which expects us to care about the regulars) and 5 (which is about idols and maid cafes, including a girl who keeps speaking gratuitous English that the other girls don't understand, grrrrr, hate hate hate). The latter has a set-piece dance sequence, though.

I liked it. The whole point is those guest stars and they'll have a lot to talk through. There will be realisations. People learn that they were wrong. Don't worry about the surreal dancing zombie afterlife classroom setting with a Big Brother eyeball and a teacher who passes judgement on who's going to hell. We're here to watch all those conversations. No plot, no action, just actors. You could do this as a series of stage plays. Ultimately, this is a bunch of Play for Today two-handers that you could almost imagine on BBC1 in 1960 in black-and-white... except Japanese and wackier.