The series was conceived by producer/creator Yasushi Akimoto after he attended a residents' association meeting in his own apartment building and noticed that people of completely different ages and occupations only gathered because they lived in the same place; this sparked the idea of an 'exchange murder' happening among such neighbors, later combined with the theme that 'everyone has someone they wish would disappear.'

The show was originally planned to run for just one broadcast cour (season), but the network proposed extending it to two consecutive cours, resulting in a six-month, 20-episode run split into 'Part 1' and 'Part 2: Counterattack'.

This was the first time in 25 years that NTV produced a drama running two consecutive cours, the previous one being 'Shizuka Naru Don' (1994-1995).

The final episode of Part 1 (episode 10) caused a huge reaction and made the title trend at number one worldwide on Twitter, with binge-watching via TVer and Hulu credited for boosting ratings in the second half.

The finale of the continuous drama scored a rating 4.0 points higher than the previous cour's drama '3-nen A-gumi' starring Masaki Suda (15.4%), setting the record for the highest-rated finale in the history of NTV's 'Sunday Drama' timeslot.

The drama's title was nominated for the 2019 U-CAN New Word and Buzzword Award.

A companion web series called 'Tobira no Mukou' (The Other Side of the Door), shown exclusively on Hulu, depicted the daily lives and family circumstances of each apartment's residents to explain their strange behavior seen in the main show, with one room's story unlocked per episode.

The Part 2 theme song 'Aitai yo' was credited to the fictional character Shōta Tezuka rather than actor Kei Tanaka; it was initially uncredited until Tanaka revealed the song's title and that his character was the credited singer during a July 2019 music broadcast, while clarifying that he himself did not actually sing it.

For the 2021 feature film, the story was set in a parallel world where Shōta, rather than Nana, attended the residents' meeting, preventing the murder game from ever starting; this was done because having the same characters already dead or revealed as the killer from the TV series would have been a major obstacle to adapting it directly as a sequel.

Before settling on the parallel-world concept for the film, other rejected ideas included setting the story in a historical (samurai-era) period, on a deserted island, or aboard a cruise ship where residents of a sister building called 'Kyun Cube Mukojima' were also secretly playing an exchange-murder game.

For the film, Yasushi Akimoto had reservations about the murder-exchange premise working among people who already know each other well, so the script has Shōta himself point out this logical problem during the residents' meeting scene.