The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective

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At Ten'ikai General Hospital, in the Supervisory Department of Diagnostic Pathology, patients other doctors find "difficult to treat" are seen here. There are also unexplained "murders" and "mysteries" that even the police can't handle. The genius doctor Takao Ameku unravels the shocking truth hidden in the mysterious "diseases."

Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective is based on the Ameku Takao's Detective Karte novel series by writer Mikito Chinen and illustrator Noizi Itō. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:

How well you respond to Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective will likely depend on how rigorous you are about your mysteries. Do you, for example, require everything to make enough sense to be applied in the real world? Or are you willing to take solutions that are delivered with enough confidence for their face value? I've never forgiven the BBC's Sherlock for inferring that anybody who regularly misses the charging port on their phone must be a drunk, but Ameku M.D. is so much fun that I'm willing to overlook much, much goofier mysteries.

Remember House? How it was a Sherlock Holmes story, but the twist was that he was diagnosing mysterious illnesses instead of solving strange crimes? Ameku M.D. is a bit like a cross between House and a traditional procedural. All the Sherlockian archetypes are here: we've got Holmes, Watson, Lestrade, and Mycroft. What would a Moriarty look like in this situation, I wonder? One of the cops is a straight-up Columbo clone. It's all incredibly silly, but plays things straight enough that it didn't feel overly self-aware. It's a tough line to hew, and I'm sure some people will disagree with me when I say that it manages to keep the balance fairly well.

You see, it all comes down to Takao, who I loved instantly. She's tempestuous, stubborn, combative, and highly intelligent. She drags her Watson, an attending physician she's nicknamed Kotori, around by the nose as she banters and dickers with off-brand Columbo. She's a short and young-looking (but fully-grown) adult who wants to be taken seriously. To sum up, she's the kind of female protagonist who I am deeply drawn to. I'm also weak to her dynamic with Kotori, which the ending theme indicates may turn romantic; if you like bossy women and the men who have the misfortune to catch their eye, they may also be for you.

The production isn't particularly impressive, but there were some nice details added, like Takao having to roll up her pants or Kotori's medical alert bracelet; every character has their own way of carrying themselves and, in the scenes outside the hospital, of dressing. It's also bolstered by an excellent voice cast, including Ayane Sakura, Kenshō Ono, and Junichi Suwabe. Ameku M.D. isn't for everyone, but it is for me.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating: (for the contents of the actual episode)
Rating: (for making an anime with Columbo and House teaming up to solve a medical murder mystery)

For the first five minutes of this episode, I was bored. It was a slew of medical jargon and a brief introduction to our first patients. Then, up shows our heroine, the titular Ameku M.D. who proceeds to diagnose both patients' abnormal conditions with a glance, making sure to point out how those responsible were idiots.

At this point, I was sure I understood what this show was supposed to be: House if Dr. House was a young-looking Japanese woman instead of a middle-aged Hugh Laurie. Honestly, that's a fine concept for an anime. There's a reason House ran for eight seasons, after all.

As the medical drama pattern goes, we dive into the week's medical mystery. A man is found at a construction site with his leg bitten off and his blood entirely blue. He is rushed to the hospital where he is declared DOA. Ameku is intrigued by the mystery but is told not to investigate. Again, exactly what you'd expect from the formula. But I didn't expect Ameku to go to the crime scene and run into literal Columbo.

Now, this is simply unfair. You can't just put Columbo in your anime like that, even if you put a lampshade on it by mentioning how he looks like he's “cosplaying a detective in a police drama.” I mean, just look at his mannerisms—it's Peter Falk in anime form! Frankly, I'm such a huge Columbo fan that I almost gave this episode a 5 out of 5 for this character alone.

But then it dawned on me what this series actually is—or at least this arc of the story: It's Dr. House and Columbo teaming up to solve a medical murder mystery. That is fantastic. I am 100% on board. Ending on the crazy reveal that the dead man's leg was bitten off by a T-Rex (I'm assuming a fossil was the murder weapon)? Exactly the kind of twist I was hoping for.

Now, putting my Columbo fanboy nature to the side, this episode was far from perfect. It was unevenly paced and full of jargon. The T-Rex reveal combined with Ameku wanting to see that exhibit felt too contrived for my taste. However, it was still an above-average episode of anime and one that has me dying to see episode two, not just to see if Columbo's next case involves solving those pesky Death Note murders.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Neither Knox nor Van Dine included it in their lists of the do's and don'ts of writing detective fiction, but I feel there's room for both to have added one more commandment: Don't Make Your Detective Insufferable. Dr. Takao Ameku certainly isn't the first fictional amateur sleuth to attempt “Sherlock Holmes” but end up somewhere much more irritating, but she's one of the better examples of the phenomenon. Swanning around a hospital in open-toed shoes is weird, but showing up and trying to convince a doctor working in the ER to leave his shift early to go watch Jurassic Park? Not wanting him to answer an emergency call from first responders? That's the sort of thing it's hard for a character to recover from, no matter how much of a genius they're meant to be.

In case you couldn't tell, our ostensible protagonist didn't get off on the right foot with me. Her attitude comes across as bratty, and I'm torn between whether she's meant to be precisely that (but in a fun, quirky way) or if she's intended to appear to be on the ASD spectrum. It's not really my place to say, but the end result is a character who is actively a detriment to her own show. That doesn't mean, of course, that she's fully reprehensible; there's a moment in the first episode where she takes a mother to task for inadvertently making her own child sick by overdosing him on vitamin A. The mom was well-intentioned – she thought copious amounts would give her son better eyesight. But she still ignored dosing recommendations and hurt her child, and Takao reaming her out is one of her few good moments. It also indicates that we're meant to see her as a genius detective and doctor, which gives her the qualifications to solve complex mysteries that Detective Columbo-Sakurai can't figure out.

There's a genuine attempt to make this a fair-play mystery. The question of why a man's blood is blue does have a medical cause that I'd at least heard of, and Jurassic Park isn't just a random name drop, while an unremarked-upon tattoo is also significant. But elements of the unfolding of the mystery don't make sense. How much does a T-Rex skull weigh, and could one be used as a guillotine? Why would a first responder not recognize a body in rigor mortis immediately, especially if they were doing chest compressions? How is blood still flowing when there's no heartbeat? Where did the missing lower leg go, and why is no one looking for it? And why did the hospital allow Takao to build a little stone house on its roof? Surely, that violates something municipal.

The best I can say about this is that it's trying. Takao has a catchphrase that involves medico-legal jargon, and clues are seeded, even if not all points are considered. They don't try to tell us that blood would have remained liquid on the floor for hours and Takao's family is as irritated with her as I am. But the animation is stilted, the bodies a little off in proportions, and Takao is too annoying to make this truly enjoyable. If a dub can make Sakurai sound like Peter Falk, I might give it another chance, but even a fair-play mystery can't save this for me.

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James Beckett
Rating:

The Holmesian archetype of the super-deductive detective fits almost too well within the trappings of the medical procedural. We've had so many stories over the years about doctors with genius brains and tortured souls who are the only ones who can crack mysterious medical mysteries. So many of them have gone on to become classics (or, at least, cult favorites). You've got your Black Jacks, your House M.D.s, your Doogie Howsers, and whoever the heck was on that Good Doctor show that made the funny faces in all those memes. Well, now Dr. Ameku Takao is on the scene with her perfectly coiffed hair and hygienically dubious open-toed sandals. Does she hold a candle to the legends that have preceded her?

No, not really, but it's not for lack of trying, and the anime isn't a complete disaster or anything, either. The animation and direction don't make for anything especially notable, but the show is trying its best to craft some decent medical drama. We've got some decent, moody camera angles and the kind of “Stock Background Music That You're Positive You Heard in a Visual Novel Somewhere Back in the Day” soundtrack that gets the job done. Despite how common they've always been in soap operas and primetime TV, we don't actually get very many medical procedurals in animated form, so the show's got novelty going for it, if nothing else. I guess, in that sense, it really is similar to those old syndicated TV mainstays, where you could definitely throw on an episode of Ameku M.D. and be mildly entertained for a half-hour.

The main issue, for me, is that the show commits the most common sin of any Sherlock wannabe, which is that it mistakes the simple act of throwing a bunch of deduction montages and random, bizarre “clues” at the screen for creating a legitimately compelling puzzle for our heroine to solve. The premiere episode thinks that we're going to be naturally amazed by Ameku's ability to notice a kid going through a vitamin overdose, which is far too mundane an introduction for our supposed super doctor, but then it dives into a case involving a dinosaur skeleton and blue-colored blood that feels artificially strange and convoluted. It's like you can tell that the creators have read plenty of really good mystery stories and whodunits over the years but haven't quite cracked how to make the pieces actually fit together in a story of their own. Then again, the thing about procedurals is that they're only as good as the procedure that they're unraveling with each case, so there is always the chance that Ameku M.D. could really find its footing in future stories. Still, this is a far cry from the likes of Yatagarasu or Undead Girl Murder Farce, so far as anime capers are concerned.