In Death Note—a Japanese animé series originally aired between 2006 and 2007—a young schoolboy named Light Yagami finds a magic notebook lying on the ground. Inside are detailed instructions as to how to use the titular book.

The human whose name is written in this note shall die.

This note will not take effect unless the writer has the person’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.

If the cause of death is not specified, the person will simply die of a heart attack.

After writing the cause of death, details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

These simple but specific rules lay the foundation for the most clever television show I’ve watched in a long time.

After a couple of testing flirtations makes it clear the book is real, Light resolves to use it to kill every criminal in the world and to eventually create a world free from evil. After days of writing names in the book, he is visited by the shinigami—a death god—responsible for dropping the book to Earth. Expecting punishment, Light is instead told that there are no immediate consequences. The shinigami is just bored.

The show then becomes about the rivalry between Light and L, an anonymous and eccentric detective attempting to catch the person responsible for hundreds of seemingly impossible murders.

The show plays like a twisted combination of Dexter and Jonathan Creek. The Dexter comparison is obvious: the protagonist in each is a sociopathic killer with a vigilante’s moral code, and both have a cop for a father. But where Dexter is strict about only killing the criminals, Light is willing to murder anyone who stands in his way, even if they’re police officers or FBI agents.

The more important difference is that where Dexter is often saved from compromising circumstances through fortunate happenstance, Death Note instead forces its character’s to think their way out. This is what was always so excellent about those early seasons of Jonathan Creek. That and the character living in a windmill.

Both Light and L are willing to go to extremes to win, and the show spends a lot of time dealing with the inner lives of each as they attempt to second-guess and outwit one another. It becomes impossible to root for Light pretty quickly—where Dexter’s outward persona is charming and affable, Light is characterised by teenaged petulance and a frightful God complex. But it is both thrilling and excruciating to watch him squirm out of the predicaments in which he finds himself, each situation eventually resolved with logic and a careful interpretation of those aforementioned rules. It’s the I, Robot of supernatural murder fantasies.

I’ve been watching a lot of animé recently, introduced to most of it by the generous Richard Cobbett. It is refreshing, after years of Western television and film, to discover an entirely new culture with its own tropes, traditions and styles. By which I mean that animé is strange. Death Note is perhaps the least odd of what I’ve been watching, but it’s amongst the best. Despite the comically dramatic direction of entirely mundane tasks.