The Famous Detective Academy of Star Detectives (名侦探学院)

Plot

The series is not a drama with a scripted story but a competition whose "plot" is the cast itself: seven semi-amateur high achievers, thrown into a new game format every season, whose rivalries, alliances, and friendships became the real narrative. What follows is how the show evolved, season by season.

Season 1 (2019): The dice decide

The first season is a studio competition framed as a board game. The seven cast members roll dice on a checkerboard to advance, and every square they land on triggers a challenge: logic puzzles, memory games, deduction tasks, head-to-head battles combining team play and individual play. The stakes are explicit from the first episode: whoever finishes as No. 1 earns a spot on the actual set of Who's the Murderer season 5 as a detective assistant, appearing on television alongside the celebrity cast. The tension comes from watching people who are genuinely, frighteningly good at puzzles fight over that single slot. Episodes run 60 to 90 minutes, released Sundays and Thursdays at noon on Mango TV as member content ²². Because the show was recorded in the rehearsal time of the parent program, using its existing venues and staff, the whole thing cost almost nothing to make ²³.

Season 2 (2020): Murder scripts and shared housing

The format shifts from studio games to scripted murder mysteries in the style of the parent show, with the members playing suspects in written cases, plus a co-living (合宿) element where the cast shares a house. The co-living was not the producers' idea; it came from fans, who flooded the crew with suggestions for segments including the co-living, werewolf games, Avalon, and the breakfast games, most of which the show adopted ²³. The members now solve cases by day and live together by night, and the show's center of gravity moves from "who wins" to "who these people are when they are tired and hungry at 2 a.m."

Season 3 (2020): The RapStar moment

Season 3 combines co-living with studio variety games, and it is the season where the cast stops being puzzle contestants and becomes full variety performers. It produced the single most famous scene in the show's history.

The "RapStar" sequence, in which the reserved, finance-world Guo Wentao (文韬), who up to that point had been the cast's quietest and most awkward member, is pushed into a deliberately ridiculous rap performance and commits to it completely, became the clip that defined the show. Staged as an over-the-top parody, with the other members hyping him on and the production leaning into the absurdity, the scene works because of the gap between the man and the moment: a former finance professional who had to take annual leave from his day job to record season 1 ²⁴ suddenly owning a stage like a born showman. Fans replayed it as proof that the show had turned a group of brainy amateurs into genuine entertainers, and retrospective coverage singles it out as the moment the "Academy Members" persona crystallized ²⁴.

Season 4 (2021): The village treasure hunt

The biggest format change yet: a three-day, two-night treasure hunt in a rural village, combined with co-living. The members are turned loose in the countryside to find a hidden treasure, and the competition turns feral. They stay up until 2 a.m. working through puzzles, hide clues from each other while pretending to cooperate, and deliver full dramatic performances in the accusation rounds, behavior the fandom affectionately nicknamed "内卷" (involution, the culture of relentless competitive overexertion) ²⁵. Cast members Guo Wentao and Qi Sijun both called this the most fun of the first four seasons ²³, and the season earned a Douban score of 9.1, far above the big-budget hits airing at the same time ²⁵. It was also the first season with a title sponsor, after three seasons of none ²³.

Seasons 5 through 9: From spin-off to universe

Season 5 drops "明星大侦探之" from the title entirely ²⁶, adds celebrity guest Yang Di to widen the audience, and combines treasure hunts with storyline play. It backfires with the original fans, who resent the dilution of the semi-amateur cast at the time ²⁴. The show course-corrects: season 6 builds real-world themed stories and scores 9.0 with more than 10,000 raters, all achieved with a nearly all non-celebrity cast ²⁴. Season 7 moves to an anthology format, which a Communication University of China review dinged as a "variety show mashup" that risked fragmenting the content and leaning on personalities rather than segment design ²⁷. Season 8 builds a rules-based game world, and season 9 introduces a Dual-Faction Dual-Case Speed Reasoning format that ties deduction to real social issues; its story "Rose's Farewell," a reunion spanning two decades with a fateful twist, was singled out for leaving viewers in tears ²⁷.

Around the flagship, the universe grew to six IPs and over 200 episodes: brainy content like Secret Escape: Master Edition and Forest Evolution Theory, lifestyle shows like Nanbo Wan's Gathering and Jumping into the Geography Book's Journey, and the Detective Heart Concert ²⁶. Qi Sijun joked that he had already urged the producers to plan through season 7 ²³; they blew past it.

Characters

• Pu Yixing (蒲熠星): The show's ace. A Nanjing University graduate with a Johns Hopkins degree and a six-time defending champion from the quiz show One Stand to the End, he solves puzzles so fast in Secret Escape: Master Edition that the crew once turned off the lights to slow him down ²⁶. He grew from quiz prodigy into the group's biggest star, with over 3 million Weibo followers ²⁵.
• Guo Wentao (郭文韬, 文韬): The quiet one who became the meme. Still working in finance during season 1 and using annual leave to film ²⁴, he went from awkward newcomer to the season 3 "RapStar" legend.
• Zhou Junwei (周峻纬): McGill University psychology graduate, the cast's calm analytical presence ²⁵.
• Qi Sijun (齐思钧): The host-adjacent glue of the group, quick with a joke and the one lobbying for season 7 before it existed ²³.
• Tang Jiuzhou (唐九洲), Shi Kai (石凯), Shao Mingming (邵明明): The rest of the founding seven, filling out the games with energy, music, and comic relief.
• He Yunchen (何运晨) and Li Jinye (李晋晔): Later members who kept their day jobs as working lawyers while filming ²⁴.

Interpretations and controversies

The main controversy is season 5. Adding celebrity guest Yang Di to broaden the audience angered the original "first-generation fans," who felt the show's charm lay in its semi-amateur cast, and season 5 became the lowest-rated season on Douban at the time ²⁴. Season 7's anthology format drew a similar academic critique: too many elements, content too fragmented, personalities carrying what segment design should ²⁷. Fans also frequently debate the show's "CP pairings," which director He Shu insists were never manufactured: the program, she says, never set out to sell romance, and the pairings happened by accident ²³.

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The show is itself a spin-off, and the lineage matters. Its true origin was Secret Escape: Master Edition (密室大逃脱大神版), a 2019 test version of Mango TV's Secret Escape in which high-IQ puzzle experts were invited to check whether the escape rooms were solvable; the footage was cut into 30-minute member-bonus episodes, and the Master Edition's Douban scores ended up beating the celebrity version's every season ^{26 • 24}. From that seed grew the six-IP "院人" (Academy Members) universe: Secret Escape: Master Edition, Forest Evolution Theory, YES OR NO, Nanbo Wan's Gathering, Jumping into the Geography Book's Journey, and the Detective Heart Concert, with the group earning its own stage at Mango TV's all-star galas ²⁶. A 2024 Nanyang Technological University thesis studied exactly this phenomenon: how a derivative of the Who's the Murderer universe became an independent, profitable IP ²⁸.