Aired on TBS in spring 2010, Tumbling is an absolute treasure trove of Japanese zeroes-to-heroes school drama tropes. It's got everything you can expect from the genre, and some extra. There are obscure sports, school rivalries, feuding friends, teary speeches, inspirational teachers, yanki, ikemen, and last but certainly not least, shiny leotards! Rookies reformed delinquents with baseball. Tumbling does it with rhythmic gymnastics.

Yamamoto Yusuke leads the bad boy contingent of the club as a hot-headed, soft-hearted yanki who develops a passion for the most unlikely of sports - and he gets all his friends to join, too. Seto Koji provides the nerdy contrast as the mild-mannered team captain who has lots of heart but lacks direction. Expect the usual team infighting when the delinquents come lumbering into the ragtag underdog team, followed by the requisite training sequences, team bonding, and long-winded speeches a la Rookies. It's all previously treaded territory but nonetheless entertaining stuff for genre fans, made even more worthwhile by the gymnastics routines.

Men's rhythmic gymnastics lags far behind its women's counterpart in terms of recognition on the international level, but it's a different story in Japan, the country that has most embraced and developed the sport. Men's rhythmic gymnastics includes both individual apparatus events and a group competition in which teams of six gymnasts perform free-exercise floor routines, similar to the floor exercise in artistic gymnastics. The boys of Tumbling are in it for the group competition, and the cast really deserve some recognition for completely performing their own tumbling without stunt doubles.

Though the drama does employ some blatantly obvious editing to skirt around the skills too difficult for the actors to complete, by and large, the ikemen cast of rising stars display remarkable athletic prowess as they stumble and tumble their way through the series. Donning shiny pink leotards takes confidence, and getting six guys to flip in unison just takes plain old time and practice. Not since Waterboys has a girly sport seemed so - well, not manly, but physically demanding and unexpectedly impressive. AAA's Nishijima Takahiro, in particular, puts his dancing background to acrobatic use, and even performs a complete individual double ring routine at one point.

Whether it's the characters that shaped the cast or the cast that shaped the characters, either way there is some obvious fan service typecasting at work. Daito Shunsuke keeps his Crows Zero hair and cool exterior, and Miura Shohei looks like he just walked over from the set of Gokusen 3, which is just as well since Tumbling has its share of Gokusen-style alley scuffles and warehouse brawls. Yanagishita Tomo's character also gets a surprising arc that is not so surprising to anyone who's watched his most representative works. Joining the supporting characters are EXILE's Akira, playing against type as the wimpish, inspirational teacher, and the always welcome Otsuke Nene as Yamamoto Yusuke's straight-talking mother. The deep supporting cast benefits the drama greatly as Yamamoto Yusuke and Seto Koji don't yet entirely convince as leading men. In a team setting, however, they balance out fine with the rest of the cast, especially when they're tumbling around in shiny leotards.