There is an obvious advantage to adapting a beloved anime series as a live-action show for a western audience: you bring to the show an existing enthusiastic fanbase. That advantage is counter-balanced by a hefty disadvantage that could be best summarised as you bring to the show an existing enthusiastic fanbase.
I have watched some of the original animated show but I only did so after watching the Netflix version. Cowboy Bebop was something I'd always intended to watch but never got around to, either because of time or availability. So I had a limited sense of the story other than wacky/cool adventures of some bounty hunters and there was a corgi involved somehow.
Having spent part of this year watching Firefly for the first time, it felt fitting to watch the Netflix Cowboy Bebop — after all "cowboy" is right there in the title! By the time I did, the show had already been cancelled making it even more fitting as another series with a single season.
For the rest of the review, I'm putting aside the original.
Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) is the captain of the spaceship Bebop and, with his associate, Spike Siegel (John Cho), is a bounty hunter aka "cowboy". This work involves them flying around the grungy semi-worlds of our solar system, where humanity has fled to after an unspecified disaster on Earth. Both Jet and Spike have a dark past. Jet is an unfairly disgraced police officer, whereas Spike has past connections with the shadowy and powerful gangsters known as the Syndicate. In the first episode, they cross paths with yet another bounty hunter, Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda), a woman who lost her identity after an extended period in "cryo-sleep".
Both Jet and Faye's backstories are explored in the series and provide underlying momentum to the plots but it is Spike's past that is the central story of the season. That takes us to the two other major characters. Julia (Elena Satine), a former nightclub singer who is also the partner to the aptly named Vicious (Alex Hassell), a brutal and ambitious member of the Syndicate. As the series progresses we learn of Spike's former life as "Fearless" — Vicious's righthand man but also the former lover of Julia. With both Vicious and Julia initially believing Fearless to be dead, Spike's activities as a bounty hunter put him on a collision course with his past life and with Vicious's plans to take ultimate control of the crime syndicate.
Of the ten episodes, the first half roughly falls into the more comedic/cartoonish crime hijinks and the second into the more tragic-operatic story of the conflict between Vicious and Fearless. Oddly, it's clear that the show wants to get that stylish absurdity but the script, direction and performances all work better with the more overwrought Fearless/Vicious storyline. Balancing comedy with tragedy is an old dramatic dilemma, which is why Macbeth* has a knock-knock joke in it.
It's a good cast and I did really like the visual style and the rundown, cobbled-together future setting. Like Firefly, we have scattered humanity spread across multiple space-borne locations but with a limited range of places. Although there are nods to Westerns as a genre, the setting is overall more urban and crime orientated. It's the Wild West only in a sense of lawlessness.
Scripts and dialogue though, often fall short. The banter is clunky and that's one of the reasons why the more grim storyline works better. Vicious is a not-so-bright chewing-the-scenery villain and that's the kind of character that the writing works well for. Alex Hassell leads with his very impressive chin, as the self-absorbed thug who thinks of himself as a smarter and more cultured man than he is. It's arguably a one-dimensional character but he has a lot more oomph as a consequence because he's not intended to be quirky, witty or sardonic. I like quirky, witty and sardonic characters but that's not the show's strong point and that mismatch between what the show is and what it thinks it is can be awkward.
So...it's fine and entertaining but also not surprising it was cancelled and unpopular with fans. What we do get though is a complete story. There's a hook at the end for a-not-to-be second season but aside from that the story has a beginning and an end that was worthwhile watching.
*[Making Macbeth references on Friday 13th - I'm living on the edge]
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