Ameku MD wears the legacy of House MD on the sleeve of its scrubs. It’s a show where, in the first episode, someone suggests Lupus while working on our first case, only for it to be dismissed. It generally does an interesting job with its characters and mysteries, but I’m not sure why I don’t like it.

The show follows Takeo Ameku, the head of Investigative Pathology at Tenikai General Hospital. She is our House equivalent. Her assistant and Watson is Yu Takanashi, who Ameku nicknames Kotori (Little Bird), which basically everyone else ends up calling him for most of the series. Together, they solve medical mysteries that are often connected to crime. There are other recurring supporting characters – doctors from other departments, and a detective who looks a lot like Colombo, but Ameku and Kotori are our constants.

The problem is that except for a couple of cases, most of these are ones that I figured out at least part of the twist of well before Ameku did. Some of this is genre familiarity, but on the other hand, to give away some of the solution of the last case – when a character does chest compressions on someone who is bone dry, in a locked room with no water, and fluid squirts out of their mouth, odds are pretty good fluid had accumulated in their lungs, and the mystery we should be working on is “Why?” Except it takes 3 episodes to get to that question, instead of taking 3 episodes to get to that answer.

Additionally, this show was wracked by the weirdest production problems. We’d go an arc, then take a week off. Then we go another arc, and then take a week off. On the one hand, I hope this means the staff wasn’t getting overworked. On the other hand, I found some odd animation hiccups that made me suspect that wasn’t the case.

In short, I thought this show was okay. The series didn’t end with the announcement of another season later, and if we never get another season, I’d be fine. There is a J-Drama version of the show, and I might go check that out to compare.

Ameku MD: Doctor Detective is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.

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