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Airdate: Top Knot Detective

Here come ninjas, samurai, yakuza, aliens, monsters and time traveling baseball players on SBS 2.

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SBS 2 will give a TV broadcast to WA-produced comedy Top Knot Detective next week.

Already having been available online at SBS Comedy Runway, this is parodies Japanese TV with a police officer turned private detective on a road to vengeance after being framed for the murder of his Master.

Introduced by Des Mangan (Hercules Returns), it is created by Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce and produced by Lauren Brunswick.

In the early 1990s, a little known Japanese Samurai-cross-detective series hit Australia, where it quickly became a cult hit. In Japan it was called Ronin Suiri Tentai (Deductive Reasoning Ronin) but in Australia it is known only as Top Knot Detective: the greatest 90s Japanese Samurai series no one’s ever heard of.

The (fictional) series was legendary in its home country as being a cultural train-wreck, led by its insane writer/director/producer/lead actor Takashi Tawagoto. He couldn’t act. He couldn’t fight. He had no idea how to write a TV show. But through various underworld connections, he had the money to make himself into a star – or so he thought.

Top Knot Detective lasted two full seasons in Japan, and then disappeared, along with director
Takashi, never to be heard from again. Only now, on the few VHS tapes that remain from its short-lived Australian run, does the show live on through thoroughly researched and factchecked mockumentary series that ended up on SBScomedy.

Created by Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce as a throw-back to the films and TV shows that were broadcasted on SBS in the ‘90s, Top Knot Detective is a mockumentary that tells the story of Sheimasu Tantei, an Edo era police officer turned Ronin/private detective on a neverending road to vengeance after being framed for the murder of his Master. Along the way he would fight ninjas, samurai, yakuza and (because Takashi didn’t know how to write a TV show) aliens, monsters, more ninjas, demons, robots, time traveling baseball players and the occasional go-go dancer.

8.30pm Wednesday, 28 September on SBS 2.

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