“My dear Hosho, trouble at Grand Hotel Teshirogi. I’m on my way now. You gotta be there pronto.”

Anime fans have been getting a slew of new mystery series lately, and The Dinner Table Detective is one of several arriving this season. I was about to say that mystery fans are dining well, but the unintended pun hit like a sledgehammer. Regardless, this show has some interesting ideas and a quirky cast, but it’s hard to give it a solid recommendation based upon this first episode alone, as the show’s mystery chops have only been hinted at so far.

This is a problem that afflicts mystery series more than any other genre. It can be difficult to strike a balance between establishing your characters and world in a compelling manner, while also proving you have the mystery chops to keep viewers invested. Ultimately, I think The Dinner Table Detective will prove to be a compelling and well written mystery series, but since we’ve only seen the set-up and not the pay-off, this remains to be proven.

The Dinner Table Detective follows Reiko Hosho, the heiress to the large Hosho Group conglomerate. Despite being in a position that would enable her to take the reins at one of her family’s subsidiaries, Reiko has chosen to join the police force, though she avoided alerting her coworkers to her social status to avoid favoritism. However, when a woman is assaulted at a high class party she is attending, Reiko is forced to attempt to navigate an intersection between her two lives. She’s aided by a strangely capable butler at the party, who regularly anticipates her needs in advance. She’s also aided and sometimes sabotaged by her flamboyant and boisterous senior partner, Kyoichiro Kazamatsuri, whose impulsive style grates on her nerves. So far, the characters and set up are fun, but as I said, this first episode is all set up. The most I can say for the mystery is I don’t have a clear sense of who the guilty party is, so that’s good. The show has me intrigued. Now it just needs to pay it off.

Madhouse is adapting this from a series of three mystery novels. Madhouse is a name associated with quality, having just produced one of the best shows of the past two seasons, Orb: On the Movements of the Earth. I had wanted to write a review for that one, but I didn’t have time. The animation here is slick and stylish to a point, but it does look a bit flat.

It took me a moment to put my finger on what makes it look so unusual, but I think I figured it out. Many anime will feature painted backgrounds that clearly aren’t designed to move. In shows such as those, you can spot what is or isn’t going to have motion, because it will be colored differently to accommodate the movement. The more details an item has, the more difficult it is to animate the object altering its shape or shifting positions. Here, both the objects in the foreground and the objects in the background have similar flat but vibrant styles, ensuring there is little distinction between the two. This creates a strong pop-art aesthetic that feels cohesive, but I’m not entirely sure it works. The OP and ED are good, but aren’t sticking in my memory. Odds are, if I end up following this series, I’ll skip those each time.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• I was never a fan of stories where a skilled individual does all the work and leaves it to a less skilled individual to take the credit. The Inspector Gadget cartoon always bugged me due to his incompetence, and that was one of many gripes I had with Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions. I hope this show allows Reiko to have agency, and isn’t just a sounding board for a different character’s brilliant deductions.
• The discussion between Reiko and the butler in the final moments of this episode did get a legitimate laugh out of me. There was some good banter there, and one of the details he revealed probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
• So, we’re going to have high society crimes in which one of our investigators is largely ignored or isn’t taken seriously by those around him… I know I asked this back when I was reviewing Ameku M.D. last season, but… Is this Columbo?

The Dinner Table Detective is promising, but some elements of its formula need to be seen before I can offer a full recommendation. If you’re hankering for a good mystery series this season… Well, I suppose you have a couple options, but this certainly doesn’t appear to be a bad one.

Score: 3.5/5