The Reluctant Preacher

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A school comedy about a woman who quits her job and spends two years unemployed at her parents' home, then becomes a teacher at a prestigious private high school and finds herself having to deliver "sermons" she has no wish to give. It is an original screenplay, and on Netflix in South Korea it is available under the Korean title 내가 갓설교를? (roughly, "Me, Give a God-Tier Sermon?").

It aired in 10 episodes in Nippon TV's Saturday Drama slot (Saturdays at 9 p.m.) from April 12 to June 14, 2025. The screenplay was written by Okura, best known as a writer for the variety shows Godtan and Banana Sand, who had also written the dramas Nursing Aide at Your Side and Yips. It was directed by Hidemi Uchida, Seiichi Nagumo and Yuji Nawashiro.

Nippon TV said it had identified the hallmark of its school dramas, from The Queen's Classroom and Gokusen to Mr. Hiiragi's Homeroom and The Greatest Teacher, as the "divine sermon" that wins students' hearts, and had built this series around the opposite: an unmotivated teacher. Okura said that whenever he watched a sermon scene in a school drama, he wondered when and where the teacher had come up with those words and thought it would be a real chore if he had to do it himself, and that he put those thoughts into this drama.

Alice Hirose plays Shizuka Urumi, a Japanese-language teacher and the homeroom teacher of second-year Class 10 at a prestigious private school. It was her first role as a teacher, and she returned as one 12 years after playing a student in No Dropping Out: Back to School at 35, which aired in the same Saturday Drama slot in 2013. Shota Watanabe of Snow Man plays math teacher Hikaru Urami, Yoshino Kimura plays principal Kyoko Kago, and Mirai Shida plays Aika Suzuki, a mysterious woman who appears from Episode 2.

Its Video Research household rating in the Kanto region was 6.1% for the premiere, peaked at 6.4% with Episode 6 and hit a low of 4.1% with Episode 8; a simple average of the published figures for the 10 episodes comes to about 5.4%. Episode 1 drew 2.07 million plays across TVer and Nippon TV's catch-up service in the 10 days after release. The theme song is "Aria," which AiNA THE END wrote for the drama, and Hulu Japan released three spin-offs focusing on the teachers' "sermons."

See alsoThe Queen's Classroom 2005No Dropping Out: Back to School at 35 2013The Greatest Teacher 2023Nursing Aide at Your Side 2024Yips 2024

Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: ntv.co.jp, Japanese Wikipedia, netflix.com, mantan-web.jp, tvlife.jp, news.mynavi.jp · 2026-10-10