Shinhannin

From the pretty good Eerie Mienai Kao, we go back the to usual WOWOW/jdorama staple; an old murder mystery where every few minutes someone will utter the world the 34 year old murder incident, everyone of the police investigators will have this very concerned face all the time and of course the higher ranking people are always corrupt and incompetent.

The best thing I can say about Shinhannin is that at least its only 5 episodes. As for bad things, well, I've got a lot of bones to pick with this show.

The story is told from two timelines, present day when the father of the kidnapped child is killed and the past when the investigation was reopened. Because we already know what's happening in the present day, its up to the writer to make what happened in the past interesting so we can guess how it affects present day. Best example of this would be 20th Century Boys.

Unfortunately, nothing really surprising happens in the past timeline. All the red herrings seem like very obvious red herrings. The worst crime of all is that at the end of the episodes, I never thought; this piece of information has got me all excited, I can't see what happens next! Shinhannin never gave me any clues or crumbs that got me intrigued like most mystery shows. (See Yami no Bansosha or Kageri Yuku Natsu)

I plodded through 5 episodes just to see the ending and what a disappointment it was. Surely there must be a reason WOWOW adapted this novel. They tried to portray the ending like some great tragedy of misguided family love and I could not believe the words that came out of Tamikawa Takaya's mouth. Very disappointing below average jdorama from WOWOW.