General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Under the Skin (猎罪图鉴)

Under the Skin (猎罪图鉴) is a Chinese crime suspense drama in which a police forensic portraitist, Shen Yi (沈翊), and a criminal police captain, Du Cheng (杜城), solve cases together at a fictional Beijiang precinct. It premiered in mainland China on 6 March 2022 with 20 episodes of about 45 minutes each, aired on iQiyi and Tencent Video, and was followed by a 28-episode second season in December 2024.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / English title	猎罪图鉴 / Under the Skin (also known as Pictures of the Hunt)¹^•³
First season	20 episodes, 45 minutes each, premiered 6 March 2022 on iQiyi and Tencent Video¹
Lead cast	Tan Jianci as portraitist Shen Yi; Jin Shijia as Captain Du Cheng; Qin Hailu as Bureau Chief Zhang⁴
Creative team	Director Xing Jianjun; screenwriters Jia Dongyan, Wu Yao, Zhang Han, Zhang Fan, Zhang Min, and Liu Yifei; produced by iQiyi and Linmon Pictures⁵
Second season	猎罪图鉴2, 28 episodes, premiered 10 December 2024 on iQiyi, directed by Liu Shuqiao²^•⁶
Reception	Season 1 reached a Douban score of 7.6 after opening at 6.9; season 2's iQiyi heat value passed 8,000 within 19 hours of launch⁷^•⁸^•⁶
Audience	Female viewers made up more than 60% of the audience, an unusual profile for a Chinese crime drama⁹

Spoilers

Premise and characters

Shen Yi is a budding painter whose world is upended after a commissioned work becomes entangled in a botched police matter; a decade-spanning jump of seven years finds him entering the Criminal Investigation Unit as a forensic portraitist, partnered with Captain Du Cheng.¹⁰ Shen Yi can sketch a suspect's face from a witness's verbal description alone, or from blurry surveillance footage, and the show presents techniques such as reconstructing a victim's face from a skull, inferring a father's appearance from his daughter's features, and picking one real face out of more than ten AI-generated fakes.⁷^•¹¹

The supporting cast includes Zhang Bojia as He Rongyue, Zhu Jiaqi as Jiang Feng, and Lu Yanqi as Li Han.⁴ In the second season, Shen Yi and Du Cheng are already established partners at the Beijiang precinct, and the opening case involves a four-member idol group in which three members die mysteriously in a talent-show dormitory, exposing bullying and drug use within the group.²^•⁷

Franchise and adaptations

The series spawned extensions beyond television. A stage musical adapted from the drama, produced by Suzhou Miushike Culture Technology and Hangzhou Film and Television, premiered at the Tianqiao Art Center in Beijing.¹⁹ A March 2023 announcement by the production company's listed parent stated that a Thai version of Under the Skin was under development alongside other localized formats.²⁰ Season 2 was scheduled for broadcast in Japan on Satellite Theater from 10 August 2025, and for a linear run on Shanghai's News Comprehensive channel from 27 May 2026 in the 19:45 prime theater, two episodes per day.⁶ The theme song, also titled "Under the Skin" (猎罪图鉴), is performed by Tan Jianci, who plays Shen Yi.⁵

The portraitist premise

The show's central device, simulated portraitry (模拟画像), is a real forensic technique in which investigators draw a suspect's facial likeness from witness information to help find a perpetrator or identify a deceased person.¹¹ After the drama aired, the Zhejiang Legal System News interviewed Xu Zhibiao, a fourth-grade police technical specialist with the Hangzhou Railway Public Security Sub-bureau's criminal science and technology division, who described work closely paralleling the fiction: in a 2008 Yiwu case involving a highly decomposed body that no missing-person report matched, his reconstruction of the victim's face became what investigators called their last hope for the stalled case.¹¹ He noted that when an investigation has no leads, the portraitist can be the final resource, sometimes sketching while a police chief waits behind the witness.¹¹

Production approach

The concept originated when the writing team learned about the portraitist profession during field research and found the group compelling.¹² Producer Zhang Yiyun, an experienced crime-drama producer whose earlier credits include the more conventional Captain of Police and Hunting, said she wanted a non-traditional crime drama and saw the portraitist's viewpoint as opening a different narrative and visual style.¹³

Structure and style. The series is a fast-paced unit drama: in the 20-episode first season, at least one case occurs every two episodes, with a seven-year-old cold case running as a through-line that links the standalone cases and gradually approaches the truth.¹⁴^•¹⁵ Zhang Yiyun described its suspense as resting not on complex plot twists or hard-core deduction but on extreme emotional expression, with reversals built from changes in relationships between characters, a device she called the violation of expectations.¹³ The production deliberately avoided the dark palette typical of the genre; the series uses warm, bright tones, and the team positioned it as a drama made for women, prioritizing emotional experience and artistic aesthetics over graphic depictions of violence.¹³^•¹²

Art history in the cases. Case solutions in the first season often connect to art knowledge or the meaning of specific paintings, and the second season extends this into modern and contemporary art.⁷ For the second season the crew collected more than 60,000 paintings across schools and mainly selected expressionist and surrealist styles; screenwriter Zhang Lai explained that the chosen paintings move from classical toward modern and increasingly abstract, mirroring Shen Yi's own path from physical likeness toward the soul of a subject.⁷ In one second-season scene, Shen Yi shows the suspect Yuan Zhaodi a Marc Chagall painting of a two-sided figure to probe her feelings for the idol Chen Qin.⁷

Social themes and female characters. The cases engage social issues including appearance anxiety, workplace gender discrimination, school bullying, domestic violence, educational fairness, and scams targeting elderly people through AI face-swapping.¹²^•¹⁵ Director Xing Jianjun said each case was selected against criteria of topicality, current social conditions, and a unified tone with a female perspective; he added that the prominence of women in police roles in the show, from bureau chief to forensic examiner to ballistics expert, was not a deliberate quota but reflected the female forensic examiners the team had interviewed.¹⁶ Screenwriter Zhang Lai said the writers treated female characters as ordinary people across all roles and industries rather than isolating them, and that three of the four writers on her second-season team were women.⁷

Reception and viewership

Season 1 opened quietly in March 2022 and climbed steadily, topping both iQiyi and Tencent Video near its finale and finishing with a Douban score of 7.6, making it a recognized dark-horse hit of 2022.⁷^•¹³ Its Douban score opened at 6.9, with media and viewers debating whether that opening figure was too low.⁸ According to Yunhe data cited in a Jiemian interview, the season averaged 65.97 million views per episode, ranking 6th among hit dramas from 2022 to 2024, and showed a strong long-tail effect.¹³ Data reported by Dewen placed the female share of the audience above 60%, breaking the male-dominated viewership pattern of traditional crime dramas, with particular reach in first- and second-tier cities.⁹ The series won Innovative Drama Series of the Year at the 2022 iQIYI Scream Night.⁵

Season 2 premiered on 10 December 2024. Its iQiyi heat value passed 8,000 within 19 hours and 8,500 within 44 hours; on launch day it recorded 27.7 million all-platform plays, the highest single-day figure for a Chinese web drama in 2024, and it repeatedly topped daily charts on Vlinkage, Maoyan, and other trackers.⁶ During its run it took 15 daily championships in on-demand playback and six all-platform heat championships, and its cumulative all-platform playback during the hot period reached 1.972 billion, with per-episode plays above 70 million, the highest per-episode on-demand figure of 2025.⁶ On 24 December 2024 its effective playback market share reached 23.6%, first among dramas in release, per Yunhe data.¹³ A securities-industry tracking table recorded 394 million genuine-content plays and a 19.4% market share twelve days after launch, ahead of competing dramas on iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku.¹⁷ Critical response was more divided than for the first season; some Douban reviewers judged the second season a rougher product with weaker pacing and simplified investigation logic, while the iQiyi page lists a user score of 8.5.¹⁸^•²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › Chinese modern and contemporary drama

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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