Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop: How Not to do an Adaption

Apparently, I’ve been too positive on this thing, and have needed to be humbled. At least, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve felt the need to tear a thing apart.

I can't put my finger about it, but something about all the set design in this show feels incredibly cheap.

Let’s bury the lede; I love Wantanabe’s Cowboy Bebop. I think it’s a tight, perfect little show. I think, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, it is the perfect exemplar of its medium. Watchmen works precisely because it is a graphic novel, and any adaptation loses something crucial, simply by means of leaving the medium that made the original piece work in the first place. Cowboy Bebop is the same, an integral piece of animation. Something that has almost entirely stood the test of time, that remains as iconic as it ever was. To be clear, I don’t think any live-action of Cowboy Bebop could fully work. It’s not even really worth trying. But Netflix tried, and now we’re here. Now, I don’t want to pretend that an adaption was doomed from the start – there are ways that you could properly make a Cowboy Bebop show, but doing so would require you to ignore basically every instinct in modern television.

I wrote about Cowboy Bebop before[1], but to sum it up, one of the timeless parts of the original show is how much it defies current convention. It’s a “found family” show about a group of characters who never bond, never open up to each other, and who all go their separate ways. Their development, however big or small, happens entirely independently. It’s also not a show with a plot. It’s incredibly episodic, with the only connecting tissue being the slow unveiling of the main cast’s backstories. It’s basically a set of twenty-six short films, each with their own definitive arc, and all coming together to convey similar themes of nihilism and liminal space. Yet it’s also a show with a definitive ending. It ran for one season and then ended, with an ending that you can’t pick up from afterward. All this flies in the face of current streaming models. Everyone is making short, plot-focused ten-episode mini-series these days. Anything deviating from the plot at all is ridiculed as “filler.” Everything needs a myth arc and ongoing story. Yet, nothing is allowed to end. Take Stranger Things, a show with a really solid first season that told a pretty compelling story. It could have ended there, but now we’re almost in the fourth season. I don’t actually hate seasons 2 or 3, but none of them are anywhere up to par with the original. We can’t simply let a thing end. And we certainly wouldn’t have a crew like this without trying to make them all buddies by that end.

The constant "bonding" scenes makes me dread Netflix's plan for this show - they already have ideas for a season 2, are they going to try and make this a never-ending serial?

A good adaption of Cowboy Bebop would have to ignore all those temptations. It would have to keep the show grounded in its delicate balance between the weight of the past and the inevitability of the future. It would need to create a cast who are loveable and endearing despite the fact that they’ll never truly open to those around them, who can’t help but run from the mistakes they need to confront directly. It would need to create a world that lies in its own ruins, a dystopian wasteland created by corporate greed and indifference where the police are corrupt and the only way to make a buck is to partake in bounty hunting. To strike a tone between dreary pessimism and a borderline silly hope to keep striving. It’s a show about the beauty of the in-between.

The Netflix show, naturally, fails on every single front.

I mean even as much as I don’t think Cowboy Bebop is adaptable, you almost have to be actively trying in order to screw it up this much. Apart from a few character designs, the Netflix show is practically unrecognizable from its anime inspirations. At first, these differences seem largely surface level, but the more they are explored, they congeal into a collective whole that stands drastically at odds with the original. Take Jet Black, the grumpy owner of the Bebop, the ship all the characters live on, and partner of Spike. Mustafa Shakir is easily the best of this entire cast, thoroughly evoking the haggard tones of Jet’s English voice actor Beau Billingslea. However, the choices made to this character feel increasingly bizarre. First off, we quickly learn that this Jet is a father, and a divorce has separated him from his daughter. This idea is loosely taken out of an episode from the original show in which we meet Alisa, Jet’s lost love who one day left him without anything for an explanation. While there’s no child, when Jet finds her she has moved on and found a new love and a new life, one where she can make her own choices and not be defined by Jet’s over-protective nature. These choices aren’t always clean-cut, and one of them sends her directly in the path of a bounty, but they are her choices nonetheless. This is all told over a twenty-minute episode, conveying Jet as not only someone stuck in the roads not taken but someone whose protective nature is often harmful to those around him, while also developing Alisa as a memorable and fully realized character.

I can't stress enough that Shakir is the best part of this show. He gives a sense of gravitas to a level of insanity that would otherwise be unbearable.

In the live-action adaption, Alisa is relegated to a sit-com character, Jet’s ex and the mother of his daughter, who has paired up with an easy-to-hate step-dad who both have no time for Jet. She’s given more time and yet less development. The daughter, Kimmie, is all but a plot device for Jet, pulling him in different directions whenever we need additional conflict in an episode. Their relationship is mostly off-screen as Jet constantly reminds Spike and the audience that he has a daughter that he needs to be buying gifts for. Kimmie’s inclusion is baffling for any number of reasons. It strikes firstly of tokenism; Jet was cast as Black for the Netflix show where he was non-descript white (though voiced by a Black man!) in the anime, and while the choice is in all other ways a good one, it strikes as a little offensive when he’s also suddenly given an absentee father arc. Moreover, his constant bemoaning to Spike about how much he needs to give Kimmie a birthday gift feels like a wild mischaracterization. The entire character dynamic in the anime was that Spike and Jet were mostly just coworkers who didn’t talk about their personal lives. In the 2001 movie Jet waxes to himself that the crew really has no bond, no relationship holding them together. The presence of a daughter is the exact sort of thing that would be introduced to the audience in one episode and dealt with as its own arc, and then never mentioned to the rest of the crew. Instead, Spike and Jet are downright chummy in the Netflix show, which just makes later choices towards the season finale all the more confusing.

Spike is handled no less bafflingly. The first and easiest mistake the show blunders into is tipping its hand regarding Spike’s past. The anime only spent five episodes total delving into Spike’s history, covering less runtime than the 2001 movie. His past was vague and mostly up to interpretation; we know loosely his relationships to Vicious and Julia, but the details are left to the imagination. This is all for the best, as Vicious and Julia aren’t really character unto themselves so much as they are symbols, embodied elements of the core themes of the show. Vicious is Spike’s past come to haunt him, and is always a larger-than-life figure who remains at his best when in shadow. The Netflix show, however, introduces both Vicious and Julia as soon as it’s able and keeps them as a running subplot throughout the entire show. Not only do the two characters drag down every single scene they’re in, but they also complicate a lot of the choices taken from the anime. In short, the anime’s Julia, Vicious, and Spike were all agents of the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate. Spike and Julia fall in love and agree to run away from the Syndicate together, but Julia is caught by Vicious and set up as a trap for Spike. Julia refuses to comply and goes on the run, where she remained necessarily uncertain about Spike’s fate. From what little we see of Julia, she is built up to be a confident and independent character, an enigmatic force of her own.

This scene loses all of the impact from the original, mostly because Vicious feels like such a cartoon character at this point it's impossible to take him seriously.

The Netflix adaption keeps elements of this and drops others seemingly at random. While interviews have suggested the creators wanted to make Julia, a character who largely appeared in flashback, into a character with agency, this show manages to strip her of what agency she had. Instead of a hardened agent of the Syndicate, Netflix’s Julia is a nightclub damsel who has a one-night stand with Spike. Bizarrely, the show casts her as married to Vicious; while it was implied the anime’s Julia was in a relationship with Vicious at some point, it’s heavily suggested to be a loveless if not abusive affair. Vicious, after all, is a character primarily defined by his lust for power. Or, at least he was; the live-action Vicious is a sniveling product of nepotism in a bad Geralt of Rivia cosplay, with none of the original’s menace. Julia passively puts up with his idiocy for the entire runtime of the show, until right at the end where it tries to turn her into a Lady Macbeth character assisting in his takeover of the Syndicate. Neither character bears any similarity to their counterparts, and they’re largely less interesting to watch as well – which is a shame because they eat up so much of the runtime. It becomes clear that the over-emphasized focus on Vicious and Julia serves only to give the show a “plot” that can run in the background, lest Cowboy Bebop fall into the curse of being “episodic.” Moreover, the decision to keep Vicious and Julia paired together only serves to make Spike look like an idiot; the anime’s Spike knew Julia was either on the run or dead, but here he seems perfectly content to let the so-called love of his life in an abusive relationship with his worst enemy.

Moreover, as important elemental aspects of his past, the changes to Julia and Vicious serve to render Spike a more confused character. The original Spike was a mash of old-school noir and kung fu influences. At times he is morose and cynical, at others, he is refreshingly silly. This ever-evolving nature comes from the Bruce Lee quote that serves as his motto, “be like water,” sadly missing from this adaption. Spike firmly believes that “whatever happens, happens,” an attitude that allows him to be flippant in the present even while constantly on the run from his past. But while the sporadic appearances of Vicious in the anime always forced Spike to remain grounded, the consistency of this Vicious’ appearances and his overall lack of malice serve to let Spike off the hook. Vicious no longer feels like a haunting specter of the past, but an all-too-present nuisance. At one point Spike has Vicious in his targets, prepared to kill him, and then lets the man go, for seemingly no reason. He simply lets his past run free, a thing that seems very counter to the themes of the original. The changes to Spike are probably best seen in the loss of his artificial eye; the original Spike had one artificial eye that was just barely discolored. He tells us one eye remains stuck in the past, while the other sees the present – the question, being, which is which? Is it his past that remains forever filtered in his mechanical eye, or is his past the only thing real to him? As far as I can tell, the Netflix adaption drops this entirely, and with it, one of the most potent symbols of Spike’s being. While the show pays lip service to the themes of “living in dreams,” it doesn’t seem intent on exploring any of these ideas, with the exception of one admittedly cool new VR sequence. John Cho is good as Spike, but the writing is never able to convey the haunted nature that makes the character who he is.

For some reason, the show doesn't give Faye her iconic ship Red Tail until the end, and never gives Hammerhead to Jet. I loved how the distinct ships evoked each member's personality, and I miss them here.

It's no surprise, then, that Faye Valentine similarly misses the mark. As per usual, the Netflix show rushes to reach the hits of her character, immediately launching into background material we weren’t aware of until after we’d been acquainted with her present self. This is especially a mistake for Faye, whose arc relies on the way she surprises the audience just as she’s known to surprise her marks. The anime’s Valentine introduces herself as a powerful and competent femme fatale, possessing full agency of herself and her future. She frequently feuds with the boys, almost always coming out on top in the end, though not without her own fair share of embarrassments. When we do finally begin stripping back the layers of her personality it comes as a shock. Her present impassible confidence acts as a barrier protecting deep insecurities and a past that she can’t remember. Her constant gambling isn’t just an example of her impulsiveness but is a means to pay immense debts that have been unlawfully charged to her by greedy corporations. This adaption drops any semblance of that arc to make Faye obviously insecure from the outset. Instead of a put-together woman directing her own ship, this Faye comes off as an immature teen desperately trying to measure up. Daniella Pineda plays that character well enough, but she’s no Faye Valentine. While she’s given many of the original’s memorable scenes, and they largely still hit, they hit more out of credit to the anime’s writing than out of this show’s ability to successfully make those moments count.

This all, again, is done in the name of “modernizing” Faye. Now, to be clear, there are questionable aspects of Faye Valentine when it comes to translating her to live-action. The show gracefully updates her outfit to be more practical and less revealing. I think trading in her signature shawl for a leather jacket smacks a little of the sensibilities of the original X-Men movies, but in general, it’s a step in the right direction. The severe re-writing of her and Julia to be more “active” characters whilst totally stripping them of their agency and competency is borderline insulting, however. It’s all the more inexplicable once you realize that the original anime was almost entirely written by women and that the English dub was also directed by a woman, whereas the Netflix show is written solely by men. The claim of men to be “updating” the depictions of women that were written by men while also actively making them less complex with less agency is just a little bit suspect to me.

Mad Pierrot was somehow one of the better adapted parts of the anime, but he still feels stripped of most of the things that made him so terrifying and fascinating.

Curiously, the Netflix adaption also drops the crippling debt that acted as an anchor to her character. In fact, this adaption drops a lot of the corporate satire that drips from every pore of the original show. It adapts Teddy Bomber, a memorable antagonist in one episode of the original show, but forgets anything about what made him memorable. The original Teddy was a serial bomber whose calling card was a plush teddy bear. The episode he featured in includes a running gag of him desperately trying to announce his motives to anyone who will listen, which winds up being no one, as he is consistently the victim of Spike’s feud with his bounty hunting foil, Cowboy Andy. We eventually learn that Teddy views himself as an activist, targeting the tallest skyscrapers of Mars as symbols of the dangers of unchecked capitalism. This anti-capitalist notion is entirely gone from Netflix’s Teddy, who is apparently just a sadist who likes seeing things blow up. The change is especially bizarre because Teddy’s episode in the live-action show also features an ongoing feud, this one between Jet and Spike, and it would have been easy enough to adapt this primary characterization of Teddy into this new dynamic. However, the Netflix show seems intent on glossing over all the anti-corporate language of Cowboy Bebop. Gone are the scheming companies, reliant on sub-legal bounty hunters to make their ends meet. Gone are the anti-television notions of the original Dr. Londes character, who views television as a corruptive tool for his cult. Any mention of corporation’s responsibility for Earth’s current destroyed state is scrubbed clean, as is a lot of the corruption as the heart of the ISSP. The examples go on. It’s telling that in an interview one of the Netflix show’s creators insisted the Cowboy Bebop was “not a dystopia.”[2] Such a claim not only flies in the face of the obvious dystopian themes of the show, it also reflects poorly on the characters and the story world. Ironically, a company like Netflix blatantly attempting to sanitize these anti-industry themes is an idea that wouldn’t be terribly out of place in the world of Cowboy Bebop.

This total abandonment of the original’s core themes and philosophies would maybe be passable if the Netflix show were, itself, interesting on any level. If they so clearly just wanted to make a new science fiction bounty hunting show and needed to wear the skin of Cowboy Bebop to do so, fine, but what they made wasn’t much to write home about, either. First, the entire directorial style is baffling to look at. The long, slow, contemplative, and atmospheric style of the original Cowboy Bebop is traded in for something that can only be described as Scott Pilgrim, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson thrown into a blender. To paraphrase an old Ebert quote, the directors have learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but have not learned why. In general, the hyperactive camerawork feels more dizzying and exhausting than it does cool or energetic. The intense dutch angles and weird center-framed shots are confusing enough in isolation, but when paired with moments from the anime, you can actively see the shot composition get worse.

He looks so silly. This is the main villain and he looks so silly.

It’s not just the direction that suffers in this adaption, all of the writing sucks. I’ve already mentioned how dreadfully boring every Julia and Vicious scene is, and how childish Faye’s dialogue is, but these are just the tip of an iceberg of poor writing. Jett accuses one woman of blackmailing him, to which she replies “damn right it is, because you are Black and you are male!” Once again, the show seems to go out of its way to make its wisely diverse casting feel tokenistic. One villain is introduced with the line “you’ll never know true power until you’ve tasted the testicles of a man who has wronged you,” which, uh, okay! That’s a character, I guess. There’s a lot more where that came from. A lot of the dialogue feels like it’s ripped from a preteen Halo lobby, with constant conversations about bidets and testicle-shaving and more F-bombs than you can shake a stick at. It honestly feels like it was written by a high schooler who just discovered a Tarantino script and thought it was the edgiest thing and tried to replicate it. I can’t stress enough that the anime is not like this. There’s just no subtlety here, it’s all campy nonsense. When anime Spike or Ed was silly, it felt genuine, not like a ham-fisted slapstick routine. It reads like an SNL parody. The only excuse I can imagine is that the writers really wanted audiences to know that this wasn’t a “kids show” just because it was based on a “cartoon,” which brings me to my main takeaway from all of this.

Visually similar but thematically soulless. Just let old, good things be good, and old.

Stop adapting animated works. Like, just stop. We’re coming dangerously close to the point where we start doing live-action Studio Ghibli adaptions, and at that point, I’m walking into the ocean. Cowboy Bebop is just one of a long list of works where someone in some company thought it was necessary to translate animation to a live-action medium. To be clear, animation is a medium of art. Just the same as a novel, or a play, or anything else. But right now there’s this braindead notion that animation (even more specifically, hand-drawn 2D animation) is somehow inherently inferior to live-action. That’s why Disney is in this obsessive grind to take every beloved animated movie and repackage them in graphically realistic animation that strips the story of all of its soul. To repeat what I’ve already said, Cowboy Bebop is not made any better for being in live-action. Not only does translating the show out of animation take away a lot of the hand-drawn style that gives the show much of its moodiness, but it also necessitates filling in a lot of the minimalism that makes the anime work. Adaption isn’t always a lateral move, it’s often a downward one. It’s not even like the original is inaccessible, it’s filled with Western influence and the English dub is one of the most acclaimed English dubs ever. Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop not only can’t stand up to the original, it also can’t stand on its own. Really, it should be no surprise that a product marketed for mass appeal would strip the show of all its nihilistic and anti-capitalist themes, but they could have at least added something. Instead, this show feels like it’s about nothing at all, though there may be some attempt at a theme that I missed in my blinding frustration. It’s just all-around a sad effort from a cast and crew who could probably do better. Stop trying to adapt animated works and just make your own thing. You like the bounty hunter setting but want to turn it into a stylistic found family? Yeah, sure, whatever – just do that. Don’t try to dress it in the clothes of a better show, and just make your audience wish that they were watching that instead. And certainly don’t pretend that you’re improving on something while actively making it worse 95% of the time.

There is another lesson in all of this, though. Because as much as I like trashing on a bad work of art when they deserve it, it honestly took me summoning all of my energy to finally write this article. I watched the show a full week ago at this point, and am writing this thing later than I wanted it published. Why did it take me so long? Is it because I had so many thoughts, so much brimming rage for what this show did to my beloved original anime? Nah, not really. Cowboy Bebop still exists, and I still can return to it whenever I want. If anything, this adaption has just reminded me how good it is. No, this article has taken me so long because, despite the word count, I mostly just don’t have the energy to care. There are just so many better things to be thinking about. Like, I watched 31 movies for my last article, and sure there were ones I didn’t love, but they are totally blocked out by all the ones I loved! The lesson is just to watch more things. Because despite feeling the need to put all my thoughts on Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop into a consolidated place, it’s hard to be mad at this dumb silly insane show when there are so many other things going on. There’s a new Matrix movie coming out! And King’s Man is going to finally release! And that Spider-Man movie that’ll probably be bad but fun! And Licorice Pizza! Alana Haim is going to be in a movie! As much as I hate the new Cowboy Bebop, I’d rather be excited for what’s around the corner. All that to say, the original Cowboy Bebop is still amazing – watch that instead!

At least Ein, the smartest member of the Bebop, made it into the show.

Oh, and this show treats Ed, the heart and soul of the original show, as a tag-on to tease its second season. Which is about all I feel like I need to say about that.

[1] https://glendonrfrank.wixsite.com/franklyspeaking/post/cowboy-bebop-and-the-beauty-of-impermanence [2] https://twitter.com/WIRED/status/1458595164532797447