What can I say, noitamina improves with dwindling popularity, their focus obviously would swift to audiences less susceptible to TV ads, and more picky on where they will spend money. Anyway, despite the excellent first episode (for its genre), I am still apprehensive about the studio they had many shows that started strong, but fell apart during their run (Occult Academy, Sora no Oto, Birdy remake).
As for Mari, it is great that she pulled out two great scripts in the same season, but I wonder why for this one they promoted Menma's state as a surprise it was made blatantly obvious from the first couple of scenes, which makes me a bit worried on the execution... than again with only 11 episodes at hand and a simple concept, there are less possibilities to screw up the transition of the script to screen, like that
plot twist.
Finally, it is good to have shows like this and Iroha, that help certain viewers, bloggers, and reviewers to get over their silly phobia of the so called fan-service
