The Modern Police Drama
What Odoru Daisousasen did in 1997 was swap out the enemy of the detective drama. Not the criminal, but the organization. The precinct and headquarters, the field and the meeting room, back-channel groundwork and siloed departments — the police were drawn as a government office. A detective runs not only to chase a suspect but to talk his superiors round. If the era before it (→ The Detective Action Era) was a youth, from here the detective drama became a story about company employees.
One line of dialogue put that change into words. But where it was said is not what people think (see the myth correction).
Around the same time, a quite different direction was opening. Furuhata Ninzaburo, which began in 1994, uses the inverted form — the criminal and the crime are shown in full up front, and all that is left is how the detective corners him. The moment you decide not to pull the audience along with who did it, the interest moves to the conversation itself. The scripts were by Koki Mitani. He is reported to have said that he wrote Furuhata Ninzaburo because he wanted to watch Columbo.
Part of this current’s strength is that it keeps going. Aibou, which started as a one-off in 2000, became a serial in 2002 and has gone on adding seasons. And MIU404 (2020) wrote a cross-section of society through 24 hours of a mobile investigation unit. Guests move back and forth with Unnatural, by the same screenwriter, and the later films too are made as events in the same world — a place where a Japanese writer is doing, in a different way, the shared universe that American drama has been good at.
The myth, corrected
"The case isn't happening in a meeting room — it's happening on the ground!" is the great scene from the television series Bayside Shakedown
The line belongs to the 1998 film, Bayside Shakedown: The Movie, not to the series. The series ran for eleven episodes in 1997, and its own famous line is Waku's: "If you want to do the right thing, get promoted." The screenwriter Ryoichi Kimizuka has said the line grew out of middle managers he knew complaining that decisions got made in meetings by people who had never seen the ground. Two slightly different wordings of it circulate in Japanese; this map uses the one it could confirm in print, and has not yet checked the film itself.