Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! Is Fall 2026's Comedy Sleeper, and Here's Why It's Worth Your Time
Key takeaways
- Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! premiered October 3, 2026 across four Japanese broadcast networks, animated by Passione
- The source yonkoma by Muchimaro has run in Weekly Shonen Magazine since April 2022 and has sold more than 1.6 million copies
- Ume Mizunoe joins the student council to shore up his weak science grades and instead lands in the middle of its four distinct, eccentric members
- Masahiro Yokotani handles series composition, giving a gag-strip premise more room to build character relationships than a straight 4-koma adaptation usually gets
Fall 2026's premiere calendar is stacked with returning giants, Black Clover, The Apothecary Diaries, Tokyo Revengers, and it would be easy for a new yonkoma comedy to get buried under all of it. Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! premiered October 3 anyway, across Tokyo MX, BS11, Gunma TV, and Tochigi TV, and it deserves a slot on your watchlist that the marquee titles aren't leaving much room for.
The setup is simple on purpose
Ume Mizunoe is a first-year at Fujinasu Academy with a lopsided report card: excellent in Japanese language class, a disaster in the sciences. Looking for a way to pull his overall standing up, he joins the student council, the kind of extracurricular move students make when they need something that looks good on paper. What he gets instead is a front-row seat to four of the strangest personalities in his school.
That is the whole premise, and the show is not trying to be more than that. Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! is a character comedy first, with the "join to fix my grades" hook functioning mainly as a reason to get Ume in the room. Everything that actually matters happens once he is there.
The cast is the entire selling point
The council is built from a specific, well-worn comedy formula: put together people who do not obviously belong in the same group and let the friction generate the jokes. Here that means a charismatic but sullen president, a treasurer who reads as scary at first glance but turns out kind and refined underneath it, a cheeky, overly familiar underclassman, and a small, quietly abandoned cat-like member who rounds out the group's chaos. None of those descriptions sound revolutionary on their own. The strength of a cast like this has never been in the archetypes, it is in the chemistry, and a 1.6 million copy sales run for the source manga since its April 2022 debut in Weekly Shonen Magazine says the chemistry is doing its job on the page.
The cast list backs up the care put into casting those personalities: Shogo Sakata as Ume, Haruka Shiraishi as council president Hisako Kotobuki, Miyu Tomita as Komaro Michinoku, Hiyori Kono as Tan Otori, Shizuka Ishigami as Arisu Terui, and Yumi Uchiyama as Satomi Hiratsuka. Shiraishi and Tomita in particular are reliable picks for exactly this kind of ensemble comedy, where line delivery and comic timing matter more than range.
Why the staff choices suggest this adaptation knows what it has
Director Naoyuki Tatsuwa and character designer Ryo Imamura, who is also chief animation director, are the names doing the visual legwork, but the choice that stands out most is series composition and script writer Masahiro Yokotani. Yokotani's job on a yonkoma adaptation is harder than it looks. Four-panel gag manga are built for quick, self-contained punchlines, and a straight episode-by-episode translation of that structure tends to feel disjointed on screen, a string of jokes with no momentum between them.
Giving a dedicated series composition credit to a yonkoma adaptation is a sign the studio wants connective tissue between the gags, actual relationship development riding underneath the joke-of-the-week structure, rather than a disconnected sketch show. That is the difference between a 4-koma adaptation that works as background noise and one that builds an audience that cares about the cast beyond the next punchline. Passione, who also has FX Fighter Kurumi-chan on its Fall 2026 slate, is clearly not treating either project as a filler assignment this season.
Where this fits if you already watch comedy anime
If you have burned out on isekai power fantasies and want something lower stakes, Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! is built for exactly that mood. It sits closer to character-driven school comedies than to parody or absurdist humor, which means the jokes lean on who these people are to each other rather than on shock value or meta gags. That makes it an easier recommendation for anyone who wants a comedy that is pleasant rather than exhausting, something to watch after a heavier show in the same week without needing to brace for either direction.
It is a quiet premiere in a loud season, and that is probably exactly how a show built on four weird personalities and one overwhelmed first-year wants to arrive.
Adding the student council to your weekly watchlist, or sticking with the season's bigger returns? Let us know in the chat.