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Iryū - Team Medical Dragon Manga Gets 4th Live-Action Show
posted on by Rae First
Fuji TV announced last Tuesday that it will launch a fourth season of its live-action television adaptation of Akira Nagai and Tarō Nogizaka's Iryū - Team Medical Dragon manga in January 2014. The third season of the series aired in October-December 2010.
The Iryū 4 - Team Medical Dragon television series will once again star Kenji Sakaguchi (Ikebukuro West Gate Park) as Ryūtarō Asada, a genius surgeon regarded as a renegade in the eyes of other Japanese doctors because of his methods. The fourth season will tell an original story about Ryūtarō and his Team Dragon as they try to create an ideal hospital in the face of the current state of the hospital industry, where large companies and trading firms in Japan are acquiring overseas hospitals and focusing on treating rich foreigners while mid-range local hospitals in Japan are left in poverty and are starting to collapse. The theme of the new series will be "The world or Japan?"
Teppei Koike (Gokusen, Love*Com the Movie), Izumi Inamori, Sadao Abe (Kamikaze Girls, Uzumaki), Kuranosuke Sasaki (20th Century Boys 3: Redemption), Mari Natsuki (Sakuran), and Ittoku Kishibe (Maison Ikkoku) will reprise their roles for the upcoming series. Mikijirō Hira (Anju To Zushio Maru) will join the cast as Sakurai, Ryūtarō's only teacher.
The first season aired in 2006 and it averaged 14.8% in ratings with a peak of 17.2%. The second season aired in 2007, and it averaged 17.2% and reached as high as 21.0%. The first episode of the third season earned a 16.4% rating. The new season will air during the same Thursday 10:00 p.m. timeslot as its predecessors.
Nagai and Nogizaka launched the manga in Shogakukan's Big Comic Superior magazine in 2002, and the manga ended in January 2011.
Image © Fuji TV
Source: Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web
