A seventeen-year-old detective gets shrunk to seven, so he has to solve murders from inside a kid's body while hunting the organization that did it to him. The cases are real mysteries, not window dressing, and the show respects your intelligence enough to let you actually solve them before Conan does. Twenty-five years later it's still running because it found the one formula that never gets old: a brilliant mind trapped in the wrong shape, solving one puzzle after another, getting closer to the people who ruined his life. The pacing can drag when filler stretches thin. What keeps you watching is simple: you need to know if he ever gets his body back, and whether Ran figures out who he really is before he tells her.

Seventeen-year-old Shinichi Kudo is a gifted high school detective, famous for cracking difficult cases and dubbed the modern Sherlock Holmes. Then one night, after following two suspicious men and witnessing an illegal deal, he is caught, knocked out, and given an experimental drug meant to kill him. He survives, but wakes in the body of a seven-year-old child with his intellect fully intact. Keeping his real identity hidden, Shinichi takes the alias Conan Edogawa, after the mystery writers Arthur Conan Doyle and Ranpo Edogawa, and lives with his childhood friend Ran Mouri and her father Kogoro, a hapless private detective. As Conan, he quietly solves Kogoro's cases from behind the scenes while one murder and mystery after another comes his way. All the while he secretly investigates the criminal organization responsible for his condition, hoping someday to undo the drug's effects.