The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Detectives These Days Are Crazy!

Behold a great detective who thrills the world by solving impossible cases in no time. His name is Keiichiro Nagumo. …But all of that was over a decade ago. Now he's just your typical middle-aged dude. Nagumo is behind the times to the point that he doesn't even know what a smartphone is. But out of the blue, he is confronted by a high school girl named Mashiro, who shows up wanting to be his assistant. Witness the miracles a gender-gap detective duo can make.

Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is based on the manga series by Masakuni Igarashi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

Rebecca Silverman

I really can't fault this show for trying. It tries so hard to be funny, to lampoon the basics of the detective genre, that I feel bad for not laughing. All the elements are in place, with this second episode introducing Nagumo's old partner in teenage crime fighting, Mimasaka, who has become a police detective as an adult. He has become staid in his so-called old age, and the contrast between his thinking, firmly within the box, and Nagumo and Mashiro's decidedly out-of-the-box approach should be more entertaining than it's. As it stands, I just found myself feeling weary of the whole thing.

Perhaps it's trying too hard, and that's the problem. Mimasaka doesn't add anything substantial to the plot or humor (although he's only in a third of the episode, so that's perhaps unfair to say), and the gags Mashiro carries out are almost the same as in the first episode: a school uniform with infinite capacity, a tendency to run off half-cocked, and impressive degrees of overkill, demonstrated visually by the shift to a completely different, and deliberately unattractive, art style. On the plus side, we do see that Nagumo is a capable detective when he needs to be (i.e., when he's accused of a crime he didn't commit). Perhaps that can be developed further to highlight the odd couple nature of his partnership with Mashiro.

Detectives These Days Are Crazy! wants desperately to be a madcap pastiche of genre parody and slapstick. It's not a combination that works for me as presented, but if you found the first episode funny, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy Mashiro attempting to deal with a bomb and hunt down an underwear thief, too, and Kana Hanazawa is knocking it out of the park with her energetic delivery. I think the ghost story segment is the most successful due to the ending, but on the whole, it's just not my sense of humor.

I really appreciate what Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is trying to do. It presents us with a dried-up former child detective who is so out of touch that he doesn't know what a smartphone is, still detecting because it's all he knows. It pairs him with an overenthusiastic teenage girl ready to live out her great detective dreams. Insanity ensues, or at least tries to.

I think the first major hurdle this show isn't clearing is the age difference between the two characters. By Nagumo's admission, his glory days were twenty years ago, which would put him in his thirties, possibly his forties. That's adult, but hardly old - let me tell you, every single person at my parents' assisted living place has a smartphone, and many of them are in their nineties. It's one thing for him to have a 1990s idea of what a gyaru is, but acting like a detective from the 1950s doesn't work. I don't even think that casting him in his sixties or so would have detracted from what the show is trying to do, and it might have even made the baffling decision to masquerade as an age-gap couple at the trendy coffee shop even funnier.

I do have to hand it to this episode, though, it's really trying. The gag about Mashiro having trained herself to store copious items in her underwear (and really, which of us doesn't keep a full-size flamethrower in her bra?) is funny. If I'm less sold on the sudden shifts to a more realistic-yet-gritty style, that's because that's just not a joke I find funny. The main issue I have with the first segment of this bifurcated episode is those “old guy” jokes just don't land. The second half is much more successful, in large part because it relies on pure absurdity for its punchline. Mashiro thinking the job is to take out the aptly named Crime Family yakuza group when she's really meant to be exterminating a nest of bees is a perfect distillation of her character – and the fact that she really does take out the Crime Family is genuinely funny.

All of that said, a lot of the voices and visuals just aren't working for me. Much of the dialogue is delivered in a yell, and as a sound-sensitive person, that's almost always a problem for me. I also don't buy Nagumo's age, and the way Mashiro's body is used for fanservice when they're together is, to put it mildly, unpleasant. (It's meant to be funny, but your mileage may vary.) Mostly, this just isn't my sense of humor. If it can move away from the “old” jokes, though, it could turn out to be pretty good.

James Beckett

The nice thing about a straightforward comedy like Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is that its success more or less depends entirely on the chuckle quotient of its joke delivery mechanisms. In other words, if you laugh more than you groan by the time the episode ends, then it is a job well done! All of the other elements by which we usually judge an episode of television—plot, characterization, and the development of a theme—are secondary to the chuckle quotient. If Detectives These Days Are Crazy! ever makes me “feel something” or “consider the fundamental truths of the human experience”, that would be cool or whatever, but only if it also got the giggles out of me regularly.

In its second episode, Detectives These Days Are Crazy! successfully accomplished its goal. Through a combination of well-animated sight gags and a frankly ludicrous dedication to making sure that its characters are behaving like impossibly stupid buffoons in every single frame of the episode, it passes the chuckle-quotient threshold. If I had to dock points for any backfired bits, it would probably be on the occasions where I couldn't tell if the show was just being absurdly random, or if it was making a specific pop-culture allusion that just flew over my head (while also still being absurdly random). Take the twice-repeated punchline where Mashiro interrupts her pursuit of a panty thief with an Osamu Dezaki-style freeze frame and a nonsensical English idiom. This feels like I should be pointing at the screen and yelling, “Oh, man! Just like in [Insert Classic 1970s or 1980s Anime Here]!” Instead, I have to settle for Keiichiro pointing out the joke, which is never as funny as anime thinks it is.

These lulls in the laughter are not that frequent, and I think this second episode was funnier than the first, on the whole. Interestingly, very few of the jokes in this one have anything to do with Keiichiro being a decrepit thirtysomething, and the ones that are here end up being some of the weaker moments (Why would Keiichiro not know what an SD card is? Does this show think millennials were born in the 1970s?) Instead, the best gags come from everyone simply leaning into the surreal cartoon logic of this universe, particularly where Mashiro is concerned, since her antics play into that adage: “The more effort an animation studio puts into meticulously depicting the dumbest crap you can imagine, the funnier it is.”

I realized what I enjoy about Detectives These Days Are Crazy! as I finished this episode: It's Gintama without all of the science-fiction and Sengoku-period elements. That might sound like a bad thing, but if episodes like this are any indication, this show seems perfectly capable of hitting the same comedic strides as a solid 7/10 run of Gintama stories, and I think that's great. If more comedy anime were even close to being as funny as Gintama, the world would be a better place.

I like detective stories. I also like anime that features weathered, jaded thirty-somethings who have to deal with problems that I relate to, such as increasingly common back and joint pain, or a distressing inability to understand the humor and references of people younger than me. Based on these factors alone, I am a perfect mark for Detectives These Days Are Crazy!. As a comedy, pretty much all this premiere had to do was make me laugh a few times to get my seal of approval.

Good news, everyone: I chuckled—a few times, even. Given the incredibly low bar that a lot of anime “comedies” have set in the past, I may as well be tossing blue ribbons at Detectives These Days Are Crazy! left and right. Sure, some of the humor is the unfunny kind of stupid - I could do without the tired bit of our protagonist Keiichiro perving on his young new apprentice, for one. The show itself is not especially lecherous, though, so the jokes are more played out as cheap clichés rather than anything truly gross, which I can deal with. I'm more a fan of the surreal, Looney-Tunes-esque gags like Masahiro's ability to keep a seemingly infinite supply of random objects in the bottomless voids of her skirt at all times, or her ability to scare the bejeesus out of would be criminals with the sheer power of her hyper-realistic facial expressions.

The show also gets a lot of easy points with its “Old Man Yells At Cloud” routine. A lot of the specifics of Keiichiro's obvious fossilization are more particular to Japanese culture—the slang Masahiro uses, the trends in modern Japanese culture that Keiichiro hasn't caught on to, and so on—but Keiichiro's absurd obliviousness makes them all work even for a Western bloke like me.

Anyone my age (or older) can relate to being made painfully aware of how fast the world is beginning to pass you by now that you aren't actively plugged in to what all the cool kids and trendy influencers are up to. Just before the summer began, the students all began writing nonsense phrases like “chicken jockey!” and “happy ghast” all over my whiteboard, and they refused to explain what the hell any of it meant. It was enough to drive a man to madness.

So, yeah, if you're looking for a cheeky comedy that riffs on mystery story tropes and cross-generational misunderstandings, Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is a fun time. I don't know if it will become appointment viewing any time soon, but I'm looking forward to putting it on and relating to its hero's troubles whenever a youngster tries to get me to understand what a Roblox is.

Richard Eisenbeis

I was fairly confident after the first episode, but this one makes it even clearer that this show is not really for me. This episode is divided into three parts. The first is about the pair investigating the supernatural. The second involves finding a panty thief who bears a suspicious resemblance to Nagumo, and the third involves Mashiro catching an arsonist and dealing with the bomb he has hidden nearby.

The problem I had with each of these plots is that they are too predictable. The solution to the mystery—as well as the concluding punchline in the first two cases—was rather obvious from the start. With no mystery and no big comedic payoff, what is left to entertain you? I'll answer that question with another question: Do you find Mashiro making weird faces and shouting to be the height of humor? Then, congratulations, this show is made for you.

However, in my case, I was rarely entertained. Sure, I laughed at the English non-sequiturs that Mashiro spouts after kicking a ball and Nagumo trying to act cool by quoting Sherlock Holmes—only to realize he didn't have an applicable quote stashed away—but that was nowhere near enough to keep me engaged.

That said, I can appreciate this anime on a technical level. The visual shoutouts and art style changes are handled perfectly, making for some more than decent sight gags. And, as I mentioned last week, Kana Hanazawa is busting her butt to show she is far more than a one-note character actor. However, while this comedy is sure to make some people out there laugh uncontrollably, I am, sadly, not one of them.

What we get here in this first episode is more or less two mini-episodes. The former details the first meeting between our protagonists: former genius teenage detective Nagumo and current teenage “gyaru” Mashiro. It is centered around a single joke—that Nagumo's detective style is ridiculously out-of-date. He is completely ignorant of modern technology, slang, and detective techniques. Mashiro, on the other hand, is a detective fangirl—far more in tune with what it means to be one in the current day. Combined, they make for a rather decent detective by mixing his experience and her modern knowledge.

The latter half of the episode deals with one of their not-so-glamorous cases—a job suited more for a handyman than a detective. Of course, the big joke here is that while they've been tasked with taking out a literal hornet's nest, Mashiro takes it metaphorically. Listening to Nagumo's bug-killing advice, Mashiro single-handedly wipes the floor with an entire yakuza gang—and picks up a new staff member in the process.

As is the case with all comedy shows, this one lives or dies based on your sense of humor. In my case, while I found the core jokes rather solidly constructed, the constant stream of slapstick gags rarely got me. I wasn't bored watching this, but I wasn't laughing either.

If nothing else, I was shocked to find out Kana Hanazawa was playing Mashiro. She is so often tasked with playing low-key or serious characters that listening to her flex her voice-acting chops with someone as bombastic as Mashiro is a welcome surprise. Will that be enough to entertain me next week? Who knows, but I'll give it a shot regardless.