Detectives These Days Are (driving me) Crazy

I’ve been watching less and less anime as it airs these days – perhaps because I prefer watching things once they’re complete, or maybe it’s because of hype fatigue… whatever the core reason, taste-testing my first show of the summer 2025 season certainly did not fill me with confidence that my viewing habits would change any time soon. if you’ve been round these parts for any amount of time, what piqued my interest about this show should be immediately obvious – a past-his-prime, ex-teen detective, aging out of precociousness while taking on a high school girl as his assistant? sounds like themes I’m interested in as a baseline, certainly, so I was bound to check it out. which, with hindsight, I rather wish I hadn’t! what left me feeling so sour about Detectives These Days Are Crazy? read on to find out! 

the central humor of this show is built around aging – this is approached through gags about the protagonist’s body falling apart, and through the generational divide seen between himself and his teen assistant. these aren’t groundbreaking themes by any means, but the ways that they’re done (at least, in the first episode) left me exhausted at the thought of sitting through the same ‘throwing out his back’ gag, or his assistant aghast at how out-of-touch he is. what felt especially off, really, is that the jokes themselves felt out of touch. let’s take a common enough setup – the detective is meant to tail a woman, but – uh oh! – she’s going into a trendy cafe, and no man would be caught dead there alone!!

this isn’t too bad of a setup – it’s basically the entire premise of Old Fashion Cupcake, and people love that show! I don’t even think this is necessarily an age-centric, or even gender-specific issue – Meals With Hokusai has its college-aged (female) protagonist have a complete meltdown at the prospect of entering a trendy cafe, and Skip and Loafer had its teen girl protagonist also struggle with similar. it’s not confusing as a premise because ‘trendy’ places are intimidating! but the exterior shot of the cafe makes me feel like the author themselves is so out of touch that they don’t even know what a ‘trendy cafe’ looks like. and then we find out that the place is basically just starbucks, with fast food counter service?? bro could literally just point at things, but instead we get him balking at ordering a multi-hyphenated beverage, and then staring agog when the teen steps in as if she’s speaking in tongues. that’s barely even a punchline anymore these days, surely? 

the ‘outdatedness’ of the protagonist is also confusing in ways that don’t seem to track with the ages of the characters and the generational gaps they’re meant to portray… or with my understanding of the detective/mystery genre as it exists in japan. so, as an example, the protagonist is lectured about smartphones, before attempting to photograph evidence with a disposable camera. to me, this punchline doesn’t convey that he’s an ‘aging detective’, since I can’t really see a situation in which a detective would have ever used a disposable camera? and, as a camera freak myself, this doesn’t even serve to show that he’s out of touch, since disposable cameras are actually quite trendy, especially with teen girls (to the point I’d almost speculate that Gen Z are sustaining the analogue film industry at this point, but that’s neither here nor there…)

where the show felt like it was trying to do  ‘heisei vs reiwa’ (or, millennial vs Gen Z) between its central characters, there were moments where (from a perhaps nit-picky perspective) the punchline just didn’t… make sense? take for example her shock at seeing him dual-wielding anpan and milk while tailing someone – this feels like a really 1980s “cop show” trope rather than a meitantei thing, and the distinctly Dezaki style of the freeze frame for the punchline made it feel so specifically showa that the joke just seemed… off?  

I also didn’t really understand why he would be tailing or doing stakeouts anyways – he professed himself a ‘meitantei’, and those seem like the occupational activities of a private eye in the more hardboiled tradition. but that’s where the ‘generational divide as punchline’ doesn’t make sense to me at all!! the touchstone private detectives (in the western canon, at least) are older from the get-go, so the joke of ‘aging out’ of the profession doesn’t make as much sense when the baseline age of protagonists for the genre is 40+ and grizzled, whereas this guy is (literally) only 35. if the joke is ‘expired precociousness’, then hardboiled surely isn’t the right genre…

but let’s think about his age! given that the original manga started in 2016, that would put this guy’s era as a teen detective somewhere in the mid 1990s – which actually makes a whole lot more sense. he’s not an aging boy detective (shonen tantei, 少年探偵), but a former high school detective (koukousei tantei, 高校生探偵) – which probably makes him a big reference to The Kindaichi Case Files. I’m no expert, but as far as I am aware, the shonen tantei era of the 50s-70s – where younger children were the ones solving mysteries – pivoted in the 1990s towards older teens as protagonists. I can’t say for sure, but I’ve always attributed this to the popularity of things like The Kindaichi Case Files, though I could be wrong… I haven’t spent much time looking into it because – having read all 27 volumes of the original run of the manga – I can confidently say I do not like the kindaichi case files, and don’t really want to know more about it! which also explains a lot to me about why I didn’t like the show in question. 

the most pernicious element (of the only episode I’m planning to watch) is the eye-rollingly dull sexism and objectification, all of which are also staples of the kindaichi case files… I don’t really want to go into any more analysis on this point than I need to, though, because I feel like I’d be putting more effort into my review than the show deserves. suffice to say, it’s not an issue of ‘fanservice’ so much as it is boredom at having to watch the characters squabble over him being a creep while objectifying a teen girl – like some kind of manzai act where she perpetually punches him, love hina-esque, into the sun (alternating with him doing the same to her for who knows what). snooze, snore, boring! to this I say,