Kantaro the Sweet Tooth Salaryman Is Your Next Netflix Binge-Watch

I've been staring at my computer screen for the past 10 minutes trying to solve a problem: How do you begin to summarize a show as offbeat and bizarre and delightful as Netflix's Kantaro the Sweet Tooth Salaryman? Imagine Mad Men if Don Draper's dark secret was an unquenchable desire for fancy sweets. Imagine the goofiest show on Adult Swim crossed with the most gorgeous, lovingly shot dessert porn on the Food Network. Imagine a live-action cartoon that's also a surprisingly educational travelogue about the restaurants of modern-day Tokyo. Imagine… here, just take a look at these screenshots:

Incredible, right? That’s every episode.

Here's the basic structure of your average installment of Kantaro the Sweet Tooth Salaryman. Kantaro takes an out-of-office assignment that will allow him to play hooky for an hour and check out the best dessert shop in the neighborhood. Along the way, he reflects on the wisdom of famous historical figures—Churchill, Freud, Goethe—and applies it, unconvincingly, to his obsession with sweets. He orders something very specific and very delicious, takes a bite, makes a weird orgasm face, and is instantly transported into some kind of intense and elaborate fantasy sequence that's a metaphor for his sheer pleasure: Taking part in a La La Land-esque dance sequence, or sprouting wings and flying off into heaven, or getting drenched in a massive torrent of sticky syrup. Sometimes his head turns into a melon or a sugar cube or whatever.

And then he goes back to the office, where he evades his coworkers' ongoing speculation about what’s really going on under his stoic, buttoned-up exterior. Like a serial killer in a bad cop drama, Kantaro can't resist leaving a little trail to his secret life. As a self-described "perverted masochist for sweets," Kantaro runs an anonymous blog under the name Sweets Knight, and he does whatever it takes to increase his enjoyment—like, say, wearing head-to-toe thermal underwear on the hottest day of the year so a shaved-ice dessert called kakigori will taste even better.

And while we're on the subject: The Tokyo dessert shops featured in Kantaro are all real, and the desserts they serve look incredible. Some episodes feature incredible-looking Japanese specialities I was previously unfamiliar with, like anmitsu and mamekan; others feature desserts I know, like parfait and pudding, and make them look way, way more delicious than anything I've eaten before. A helpful Redditor actually compiled a map of every sweets shop featured in the show, and you'd better believe I've already half-seriously entertained the possibility of a trip to Tokyo for a Kantaro Dessert Tour.

It's definitely not a perfect show—you can skip Episode 8, which miscalculates by botching Kantaro's typically expert blend of creepy and funny with too much creepiness—but much of the show rests squarely on the shoulders of star Matsuya Onoe, who plays Kantaro, and damn does he rise to the occasion. It’s a deeply strange and impressively committed performance that hinges on Onoe being game for whatever these scripts throw at him, and he never misses a step.

Kantaro might sound like the kind of thing that would get old fast, but I devoured all 12 episodes of the first season, and spent the following hour desperately searching for any news about a second. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything. But I'm not giving up hope. There must be hundreds of dessert shops in Tokyo worth exploring. Will Kantaro return for a second season someday?