In order to keep people watching a TV drama series every week, it helps to have a loose plot thread — an overarching mystery that remains unexplained while the various story lines develop over time. The protagonist of the Friday night TBS serial, "Uta-Hime (Song Princess)" (10 p.m.), is Taro Shimanto (Tomoya Nagase), an employee of the Orion-za movie theater in a small Kochi Prefecture fishing town in the mid-1950s.

Taro was discovered lying unconscious on the beach at the end of World War II by the theater owner's young daughter, Suzu. He was dressed in a pilot's uniform and, when he regained consciousness, had no memory of who he was or how he got there. The theater owner essentially adopted Taro, making him the movie house's factotum and a member of the family.

If this plot sounds familiar, then you probably saw the 2001 American movie "The Majestic," starring Jim Carrey as a screenwriter who, in 1951, crashes his car in a California river and awakes with amnesia, after which he is taken in by the owner of a small town movie theater. "Uta-Hime" is based on a popular play of the same name that was first staged in 2004 by the Tokyo Seleccion Deluxe theater company. The company's leader, Mikio Satake, wrote the play and adapted it for television, and, as far as I can tell, he has never acknowledged his script's debt to "The Majestic," which was an original screenplay.