![]() ![]() 19, and fans are searching everywhere for the Cowboy Bebop anime. Maybe it’d have found a better way to draw in a new audience of fans, instead of just appealing to the old ones.The live-action series of Cowboy Bebop is coming to Netflix on Friday, Nov. It’d certainly have required rethinking some of the storylines or cooking up fresh ones, drawing different themes to the forefront or tipping familiar ideas on their head. Perhaps that take could have made the flimsiness of those sets and costumes feel oddly charming, in a let’s-put-on-a-show way, or the artificiality of this universe feel more in on its own joke. It’s enough to make me wonder how a version of Cowboy Bebop centered on Pineda’s Faye might have fared. (True star quality is being able to sell a line like “Welcome to the ouch, motherfuckers.”) No surprise the series’ single most enjoyable hour is the one most heavily centered on Faye. Her co-stars look more dialed in, and even the dialogue sounds wittier. When she’s onscreen, Cowboy Bebop nearly works. Though her Faye Valentine doesn’t show up until a few episodes in, her performance is the only one that feels of a piece with the world that the show has tried to build around it - hard and funny and a little bit cartoonish, but with an unmistakable undercurrent of sadness. (Look, I never said my standards were high.) The other is Pineda. One is Ein, an adorable corgi who steals the show simply by being an adorable corgi. He (along with most of the cast, to be fair) struggles to conjure any spark of chemistry with his scene partners - which, given how much of the series’ emotional effectiveness depends on the viewer caring deeply about Spike’s relationships with Julia and Jet, is a deadlier blow than any the villainous Vicious (Alex Hassell) might be able to mete out. Cho fills the role like it’s a Halloween costume he can’t wait to take off: He might be able to work that blue suit long enough for a few pretty shots on Insta, but the second he speaks or moves it becomes clear that he can’t get a handle on Spike’s youthful cool or his simmering self-loathing. Spike, the lead, suffers the additional indignity of miscasting. That laziness carries over to most of its characters, who may as well be bar napkins scrawled with adjectives for all the depth they’re given. (Seriously, one of the show’s biggest shocks is how cheap it looks.) Its gestures at noir and Western tropes feel like little more than just that - gestures, not earnest attempts to embody or enrich them in any way. Its vision of a dinged-up future looks like nothing so much as a knockoff Firefly, made for a fraction of the budget. There’s precious little of Cowboy Bebop that feels either fresh enough to demand attention or sturdy enough to promise comfort. ![]() Which, in turn, makes it difficult to imagine what the updated show could possibly have to offer nonfans. It’s a Cowboy Bebop too fixated on checking off boxes to consider writing its own list. The zippy pacing has turned leaden, the sharp visuals reduced to muddy CG, the playful humor translated as phony laughter, the lived-in grittiness replaced with shoddy-looking sets. The series’ biggest sin, however, is that even as it dutifully retraces the steps of its predecessor, it captures none of the magic. The few deviations it does make seem primed to divide fans: Supporting characters like Spike’s former flame Julia (Elena Satine) have been given more screen time only for the writers to struggle to come up with anything for them to do, while another prominent fan favorite has been axed almost entirely. Cast: John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, Daniella Pineda, Alex Hassell, Elena SatineĮxecutive producers: André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner, Josh Appelbaum, Scott Rosenberg, Marty Adelstein, Becky Clements, Makato Asanuma, Shin Sasaki, Masayuki Ozaki, Tim Coddington, Tetsu Fujimura, Michael Katleman, Matthew Weinberg, Christopher Yost ![]()
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