General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television

Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television* is an American comedy crime procedural that streamed on YouTube Red (later YouTube Premium) from October 25, 2017 to January 30, 2019. Created by Rawson Marshall Thurber, the series stars Ryan Hansen playing a fictionalized version of himself, an actor recruited by the mayor of Los Angeles to join an LAPD task force that partners Hollywood actors with homicide detectives so they can use their "actor skills" to help solve murders.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Created by	Rawson Marshall Thurber, writer/director of Dodgeball, We're the Millers, and Central Intelligence¹^•³
Run	October 25, 2017 to January 30, 2019; two seasons of 8 episodes each, 30-minute runtime¹^•⁴
Platform	YouTube Red for Season 1; the service was renamed YouTube Premium by Season 2⁵
Main cast	Ryan Hansen as himself; Samira Wiley as Detective Jessica Mathers; Wood Harris as Vince Vincente in Season 2⁴
Cancellation	April 10, 2019, after two seasons, as YouTube shifted from scripted programming toward unscripted, educational, and music-focused content⁶
Reception	63% average Tomatometer from 8 critics and a 98% average audience score on Rotten Tomatoes⁷

Spoilers

Premise and tone

The show's setup is deliberately absurd: the LAPD forms a task force in which actors are paired with real homicide detectives, and Hansen, between acting roles, is recruited by a mayor described as "a huge V. Mars fan" for Los Angeles' Celebrity Vice Squad.⁸ Hansen plays an oblivious version of himself, followed by a reality TV crew as he helps, and annoys, LAPD Detective Jessica Mathers (Samira Wiley), a straight-laced detective recently transplanted from Cleveland.³^•⁸

The series is heavily meta. Hansen's participation in the investigations is itself being filmed for his own show, each episode ends with a sitcom setup in front of a live studio audience, and the dialogue repeatedly jokes about the platform carrying it. In the pilot, Hansen pitches a reality series called Celebrity Vice Squad and tells Mathers it will be "more of an internet webisode thing" on YouTube Red.⁹^•¹⁰ Season 1 contained many jokes about the name YouTube Red, and Season 2 joked about the service's new name, with Hansen explaining to a suspect that YouTube Premium is watched by fewer people but costs more to make.⁵^•¹¹

Seasons

Season 1 (2017). Ryan and Detective Mathers solve a case per episode, including a John Doe murder, a double homicide staged as a murder-suicide, and the poisoning of a famous food blogger, while Hansen frets over an audition for a songless film version of the Hamilton musical. In one episode, Ryan must solve "the biggest crime of all": being recast by Joel McHale.¹² Guest stars included Joel McHale, Donald Faison, Eric Christian Olsen, and Kristen Bell playing bizarro versions of themselves.²

Season 2 (2019). The full season was released on January 30, 2019. After Mathers is shot and placed in a medically induced coma, tough-guy actor Vince Vincente (Wood Harris) becomes Ryan's new partner, and the season's arc follows the duo solving crimes while trying to find Mathers' shooter.¹¹^•² The season leaned further into self-referential humor: Ryan and Vince investigate a murder on the set of a Party Down reboot, an episode is shot at the 1600 Vine building with cameos from YouTube stars, and in one episode the two leads are recast with Jillian Bell and Lucy Hale, who solve the murder in half the time.¹³ Season 2 guest stars included Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Jon Cryer, Rhys Darby, Lucy Hale, Jane Lynch, Ken Marino, Stephen Merchant, Ben Schwartz, Dax Shepard, and Pete Wentz, among others.¹¹^•²

Production

Thurber wrote the series as what he called a love letter to Ryan Hansen before YouTube Red was attached, and the scripts already contained jokes about an obscure online platform, which made the YouTube Red deal a natural fit. He described it as his favorite television show he had made.³

Mixed formats. The show changes visual style by segment. The opening pieces are actually shot on an iPhone 7 in 4K, the main show is shot on the Arri Alexa system, and the series uses three aspect ratios: 16×9 for standard television scenes, 2.40:1 for action pieces, and 4×3 for the sitcom-style endings.³

The first two episodes premiered at the Tribeca TV Festival on September 23, 2017, where Hansen, Wiley, and Thurber discussed the show's spoof of police dramas; the official series premiere followed on October 25, 2017.²

Cancellation

On April 10, 2019, YouTube canceled the series after two seasons, along with Champaign ILL, Sideswiped, and Do You Want to See a Dead Body?. According to TheWrap, the cancellations came as YouTube shifted focus from scripted programming to unscripted, educational, and music artist-focused "docu-follows" while preparing an ad-supported free tier alongside YouTube Premium.⁶ The canceled shows joined the previously canceled Overthinking with Kat & June, Youth & Consequences, and Origin, while Cobra Kai, Step Up: High Water, Liza on Demand, and Impulse continued.⁶ Thurber said YouTube had been supportive of the show's jokes at the platform's expense, describing the relationship as "hands off, but in a good way."⁵

Reception

Critics responded to the show's self-awareness and leads. Variety's Sonia Saraiya called it "a sturdy little half-hour, with a procedural template that promises a neatly tied off case at the end of each episode," and Joyce Slaton of Common Sense Media wrote that the procedural plot is "just a framework on which to hang jokes."⁷^•⁸ Collider's Allison Keene praised Hansen as funny, charming, and likable but found the show's rapid genre-juggling buried its best material, and noted that Wiley's Mathers remained a thin "tough cop" archetype.⁹ Reviewers of Season 2 noted that Wiley's absence weakened the buddy-cop chemistry that had carried Season 1.¹⁴ On Rotten Tomatoes the series holds a 63% average Tomatometer from 8 reviews and a 98% average audience score.⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026