From our other sites
The story
Aibou (Partners), TV Asahi’s flagship detective drama, will hit a milestone in October with the premiere of Season 25, and it’s been announced that the “golden duo” of Yutaka Mizutani and Yasufumi Terawaki will enter their 12th year together. On 5ch, fans vented about the leads’ ages and their frustration with the quality of recent scripts, while others called for a reunion of the Kameyama–Kobe partnership and speculated about how the series might eventually wrap up.
Daily
8/28
It was learned on the 27th that a new installment of the popular TV Asahi detective drama series Aibou (Wednesdays, 9:00 PM) will begin in October. This season marks a milestone as “Season 25,” with actors Yutaka Mizutani (74) and Yasufumi Terawaki (64) forming a “golden duo” entering their 12th year together — setting a new record as the longest-running continuous drama series in Japanese TV history.
Source: daily.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Even the variety shows skew heavily toward an elderly audience.
Just make him a retired PI already.
As a regular series, Hagure Keiji Junjouha ran through 2005 — the 2007 one was just a one-off revival special.
I heard it got cancelled because Makoto Fujita and the staff felt it was too weird for him to still be an active detective past 70, and just as weird that his daughters, all pushing 40, were still living at home.
Though Mizutani's also past 70 now.
And how many years has the chief been chief, for that matter?
I think it's fine to just let it end now.
Though I haven't watched in years myself…
Yeah, I know the drill.
And for all the hype, the case itself, the content, and the ending will end up lame anyway, right?
Sure it's fiction, but to an outsider it's bizarre watching two leads who are past retirement age in real life still headlining.
The 2-hour specials have always been the weak link,
but now pretty much everything's gone stale.
Now that Narimiya's back to acting, maybe they'll wrap it up nicely with the whole old partner lineup reunited.
Even if it was a cop dishing out vigilante justice, it wasn't murder — this sentence is way too long.
From the bit I caught, it's not as good as Netchuu Jidai (another Mizutani hit drama),
but I guess it keeps going because people are enjoying it.
"Now then, leave the rest to us and head on home."
Each season barely has one genuinely good episode, if that.
And the specials are hopelessly boring.
Well, the writers have gotten just as old, so…
Well, I'll still watch it,
but they don't need to keep putting Shuri and Miyama and that crowd in it.
They went to the trouble of adding more partners, so this is exactly how they should handle passing the torch.
Background and Key Points
Aibou premiered on TV Asahi in 2000 as a Wednesday 9pm “suspense” slot drama, built around a Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective, played throughout by Yutaka Mizutani, who is exiled to the backwater “Special Missions Unit” precisely because he is too sharp and too inconvenient for the bureaucracy above him. The show’s format is unusual by American standards: each “season” (25 now, a record for a continuously running Japanese drama) pairs a regular weekly run with separate feature-length “SP” specials, and the junior partner role has rotated across several actors over 25 years rather than staying fixed — Terawaki is simply the latest, having held the seat since around 2014, which is what “12th year” refers to. The politics-and-police-corruption plotline the posts reference (prime ministers, National Police Agency infighting) has been the show’s backbone since the beginning, not a recent addition.
Where the thread actually splits is generational fatigue versus format loyalty: several posters want the show retired or want Mizutani’s character quietly written off as a retired PI given his real-life age, while others explicitly want a callback to the earlier Kameyama–Kobe pairing rather than the current one, treating the partner rotation itself as the show’s real narrative engine.
What the thread doesn’t spell out for outside readers is that the sidelined-detective premise was the joke’s built-in answer from day one — the character was never meant to be a conventional active-duty cop, which undercuts the “too old for fieldwork” complaints as a misreading of the show’s own setup. Readers may also assume “Season 25” means 25 discrete series in the Western sense, when in practice it reflects one continuously branded institution with a rotating supporting cast, closer to a long-running anthology franchise than a serialized single story needing an “ending” at all.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Express+) thread “‘Aibou Season 25’ Premieres in October! Yutaka Mizutani & Yasufumi Terawaki’s ‘Golden Duo’ Enters Year 12.”
Leave a Reply