Hacker Cinema
Cowboy Bebop
2021 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Christopher L. Yost
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventureCrime
Long on style and short on cash, bounty hunters Spike, Jet and Faye trawl the solar system looking for jobs. But can they outrun Spike's past?
5 negative1 mixedfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Netflix has a pattern. They have stats from a lot of multi-season shows and know that there's a sharp drop off in viewers the more seasons a show runs for, even if they're all excellent. This makes the first season a great investment, but remaining seasons are subject to rapidly diminishing returns.
So, their solution is to put a lot of effort into season 1 and, if it does really well, put vastly diminished resources into season 2. If season 1 doesn't blow their metrics out the window, they just cancel it. Since season 2's produced under this approach are usually pretty rough (e.g. Altered Carbon), there are almost never season 3's. There are exceptions (e.g. Stranger Things), but there are an awful lot of Netflix shows that never get a second season despite a very respectable first season (e.g. Marco Polo).
The anime version of Cowboy Bebop is a classic. In general, it's hard to remake a classic and leave fans of the classic happy. When the first shots of the costumes and cast came out I almost completely dismissed the Netfix series. Harold from Harold&Kumar is Spike? Jet looked like a janitor. The hype wasn't there for me.
So, I delayed watching the series, heard the grumblings, and went in with low expectations.
This is not Netflix's A-game. They did a great job in some respects, but really cheaped out in others.
The casting is a mixed bag, but mostly good. John Cho is actually pretty good as spike and Mustafa Shakir is brilliant as Jet. Pineda's Faye Valentine was less good. While Spike and Jet still felt at least somewhat like the anime characters, Valentine in the Netflix series was just off, and far too comical. Ed shows up only in the last episode and, well... Yeah. Let's face it, Ed is a difficult role and has to be played by someone fairly young. If I were directing a series like this I'd definitely want to shoot several episodes from later in the series with Ed before shooting the introduction precisely because of how hard it is to jump into the roll. The actor who played Ed was set up to fail.
The effects are good and the Bebop plus Swordfish are very well realized. The action is fairly well choreographed. The sets outside the ship are where Netflix got cheap. The rewrote things to reuse several locations a lot, such as the bar. The same junkyard set stands in for an assortment of locations and seems to pop up every episode, minimally redressed and shot from different angles.
The writing is where Netflix deviated from the anime most substantially. The plots of some episodes are almost totally unrecognizable, and generally do not compare well to the anime. The writers chose to flesh out and make explicit more of the syndicate backstory, with far more of Spike, Viscious, and Julia's past shown. The show becomes more interesting because of this. If they'd done a more faithful remake there'd have been less reason to watch the show. I'd have preferred that Ein's treatment was just a little more faithful though. Poor dog got screwed.
If you're a fan of the anime, lower your expectations, expect something a little different, and you may enjoy the Netflix series. I'd watch Season 2 even knowing it would be one of Netflix's usual half-efforts with a greatly reduced budget. It's not the anime but, if you like the genre, it's worth watching.
It failed and got canceled by Netflix.
Now, I know getting canceled by Netflix means little. I gave this show a chance, after being impressed with the intro sequence remake, but found it to be soulless. Maybe Cowboy Bebop just doesn't translate to live action; what seemed charming in the original was played for kitsch in the remake.
I couldn't even make it to the last episodes.
Cowboy Bebop and Archive 81 are oly the latest examples where Netflix cancelled a series I intended to watch before I was even able to watch one episode. So why should I keep my subscription at all? I can come back in a few years and see what I missed in the mean time.
You fail to recognize one important factor. Those that did cancel dont show up to these comment threads anymore.
Me being one of them for I think I'm about to hit the 2 year mark soon on being sans-Netflix.
Any show I like and publicly does well, cancelled on season 3. Shows that have been popping up are utter trash. I was thinking of doing a month when Cowboy Bebop dropped... yea... I'm glad i didnt. I'm waiting for Witcher season 3 to drop, then I'll get it for a month and cancel it.
Their business practices are staying from, "deliver awesome content in an awesome way" to "squeeze blood from a rock".
Back in the day, Marco Polo was their shit tier show and it was awesome. The netflix exclusives that were coming out 2 years ago were trash and I could see the writing on the wall that it wasn't going to get better. What I hear about lately, it's all a fucking joke. They're hitting the theres a quality in quantity mindset and the numbers are showing that it's not working.
Maybe if they placed more focus on good movies and shows instead of the business models LITERALLY EVERYONE RAN AWAY FROM TO GET NETFLIX IN THE FIRST PLACE... they might be complaining that there aren't enough good writers and filmmakers out there because they already bought up everyone. That's a better and much more respectable problem to have instead of being a silicon valley bro who worries about "scale" during every conversation.
I agree so much. The recent Cowboy Bebop TV show had decent casting and high production value but the worst writing I've seen in a very long time. It was like watching The Room for TV shows. It's no surprise it got canceled. I really wish their writers could be better.
The majority of comments here seem to be critical of the author's thesis, with one even questioning the cultural-political motives behind this media outlet.
FWIW, I agree with the author.
I found myself thinking about this last night as I finished the first 10-episode season of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop live-adaptation[0]. There were many changes to the original story in the live adaptation, and I feel that part of these changes involves building up a rubber-ducky story for a plot twist at the end. I'm opposed to it not just because it's a change to the source material, but also because it created a needless sense of moral ambiguity.
SPOILER ALERT
In the original, the protagonist Spike seeks justice in the final episode for the death of his loyal love interest Julia, who dies at the hands of Spike's arch-nemesis and evil syndicate leader Viscous. With the Netflix live-action, in addition to a number of story changes that allegedly made it more appealing to modern audiences, the love interest Julia lives, exacts her revenge on Viscous after years of abuse, becomes the leader of the evil syndicate, and also... shoots the protagonist?
The old Julia was perfect in the original story, but the new one cares more about power than anything else. The new version's plot twist for Julia was built up to, with a rubber ducky explanation gradually developed as a side story in each of the new episodes. The director wanted you to see Julia getting her revenge after years of abuse and then cheer for her as she becomes the girl-boss[0] of the most evil crime organization in the galaxy. This ending was... disgusting.
An overwhelming volume of contemporary media sends the message that you can be a bad person if you have sufficient justification, and that coincides with OP's concern of the overused rubber ducky device.
When I was very young and impressionable, I always liked the villains the most. In kids TV shows, villains could never be shown doing anything truly heinous, and so my sense of them was that they were the only ones who actually felt free to do what they wanted. It was the "good guys" who always ruined the party. Like Nietzsche's ubermensch, villains were great because they were not imprisoned by morality. I thought villains were amazing until I matured some. I needed to realize the value of morality and understand what real-life villains were actually capable of. More and more, contemporary entertainment seeks to deconstruct that idea, which seems like a shame to me. Every rubber ducky story strengthens some real-life narcissist's ego - who wants to live is a society where people like that feel empowered?
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1267295/
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200127-the-advert-that-triggered-a-debate-about-girl-boss