Jet’s absentee parenting becomes a larger consideration, but only when he doesn’t have much else to do in the story at hand. Weepy bombshell Julia (Elena Satine) hangs precariously between the two men without doing much of anything else, as the most basic of damsels in distress are wont to do. Spike’s tortured backstory with nemesis Vicious (a miscast, or else strangely directed, Alex Hassell) becomes the clichéd arc gluing the season together. This pattern continues as the show tries to expand the “Cowboy Bebop” world and mythos beyond the anime’s initial reach.
The pilot of the live-action version clocks in at a solid hour, and yet it finds far less intrigue and nuance than the anime did in less than 25 minutes. And yet, the most striking part of the premiere for me was far more basic than any of that.įrom pressing play to hitting Yoko Kanno’s jazzy ending credits outro, the most immediately damning aspect of “Cowboy Bebop” is the fact that it balloons an economical Western that tells sharp standalone stories in half an hour or less into a bloated dramedy that can’t quite figure out whether it’s a faithful adaptation or something else entirely. Both parties might at least find some common ground in appreciating the core cast, since John Cho (as moody bounty hunter Spike), Mustafa Shakir (as his no nonsense partner Jet Black), and Daniella Pineda (as firecracker rival Faye Valentine) are at least sharp enough to shift alongside the series’ many scattered mood changes. For newcomers, the show might also confuse as it hops across crisscrossing planets and timelines, weaving between vastly differing tones as it goes. Netflix’s live-action remake of “Cowboy Bebop” tries to be so much all at once, and appeal to so many different potential audiences, that it ends up struggling to forge an identity of its own.įor fans of the iconic, relatively solemn Japanese anime that inspired it, the show’s reliance on borderline whacky hijinks (think an R-rated “Scooby Doo”) will be nothing short of confounding.
(This post contains no spoilers for the first season of “ Cowboy Bebop,” now streaming on Netflix.)