Currently watching: Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de

Perhaps the main thing I noticed about the first two episodes of this series was how glad I was to see that the cast of Yuusha Yoshihiko to Maou no Shiro are still getting work. Kinami Haruka is the murder victim in episode one, while Muro Tsuyoshi is a suspect in the second.

That aside, this series is a murder mystery show with a rather unlikely premise. Kitagawa Keiko plays a rookie detective who also happens to be an heiress to a huge fortune. Her boss is an incompetent, vain buffoon (played by Shiina Kippei), so she relies on help from her butler to solve the cases.

At only two episodes, I can’t really tell how well written the mysteries are. The conclusions to both episodes have been a surprise, but I can’t tell if that’s due to the clues being cleverly hidden, or if it’s because the ending is so unlikely I never even considered it.

But it’s not really about the murders. This is a comedy and most of the humour comes from Keiko’s boss’s inflated self-opinion and from Keiko’s ineptitude. Meanwhile the butler (played by Arashi’s Sakurai Sho) is calm and collected, as he guides his employer to the solution. I feel a bit sorry of Sakurai Sho who has to stand almost perfectly still while Kitagawa Keiko takes up the rest of the screen but then the tables are turned when she’s the newbie detective and she has to play second fiddle to Shiina Kippei’s larger-than-life character.

This is a lot of fun, but I found I had a strange reaction to the show: The moment the murderer is revealed, I lost interest. Instantly. As each story closed with a scene or two about how sad it is that someone died, I was sighing heavily and looking around the room for something to distract me. Odd, that.