Cowboy Bebop Live-Action: What went wrong

Cowboy Bebop Live-Action review

As you know by now, Netflix created a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, and then shelved it after one season. I recently watched the whole thing, and here are my thoughts on it.

Pros:

• Mustafa Shakir is a PERFECT Jet Black. While I don’t like some of the things his character was scripted to do, he was spot-on and very likable as Jet, or at least as likable as the script would let him be. I would have watched a Jet Black spinoff series starring him. This reminds me of how I always wanted a “Jigen” spinoff of Lupin the 3rd.
• John Cho as Spike Spiegel is as good as he can be given the script. He doesn’t quite capture the essence of Spike from the original show, but he’s good enough to make it work.
• The action at times could be very entertaining and fun to watch. At times, I’d forget about how bad it was thanks to some exciting scenes.
• Music’s pretty good!

Cons:

• Oh, boy.
• Faye Valentine is perhaps the single-worst character I’ve ever seen, or at least the adaption of her character from the anime. I call her “Frat Boy Faye” because all she ever does is uses foul language and sexual lingo. I’ve been around frat boys and crazy college students. None of them could match this Faye’s vulgarity and debauchery.
• Worse, just for the sake of Hollywood, Faye gets turned into a lesbian. Now I’ll admit it right now, I don’t have any problems with characters being lesbians. One of my favorite characters ever, Sailor Uranus, is a lesbian. But the extremely forced sex scene between Faye and a woman she just bumped into is one of the worst scenes in this show (and there are a lot of bad scenes to choose from). It was all just so Hollywood could check a box, and it didn’t matter who the character was or if it even made sense.
• Finally, Faye is always mugging for the camera. You could call her “Fourth Wall Faye” because you can always tell that she’s looking into the camera. This is an epidemic with her. Everything she does seems fake because you can tell that she’s acting. A good actor makes you forget that they’re acting. Then again, some of this may have nothing to do with the actress and everything to do with the director. I simply don’t know. But in any case, Faye Valentine RUINS this show.
• The essence of Cowboy Bebop is completely lost. Jet and Spike hate each other (???), the bounty hunting gets forgotten about halfway through the show, and the series instead focuses heavily on Vicious and the Syndicate. First of all, Jet and Spike do not hate each other. Second of all, the bounty hunting was the main plot of the original show. Finally, the Vicious/Syndicate stuff was only really important at the middle and at the very end of the original anime. This show felt like it needed a “big bad,” so it made Vicious make appearances in every episode.
• There are so many problems with each individual episode that I’d have to go back and watch them to describe them here. I’m not going to make myself suffer any longer, though. One watch-through of this is enough.
• But I will speak about the last episode. Star Wars: The Last Jedi was the most depressing movie I’ve ever seen, in particular the ending. Well, this show comes pretty close. Jet Black gets beaten to a pulp, can hardly walk, is rejected by his own daughter, and ignored by his former lover. Faye Valentine just kind of disappears. And Spike is beaten to a pulp as well, while being rejected by Julia and seeing Vicious survive. At the end, an old friend that all anime-watchers know about shows up to Spike, but since the series never continues, it can be assumed that Spike dies in the final scene. There’s no hopefulness, nothing for the viewer to latch on to, not even a bit of satisfaction. No, it’s complete despair. Sorry, I don’t watch TV in order to be depressed.

In short, Cowboy Bebop the live-action series from Netflix was an abject failure. It has very few redeeming qualities and should be avoided like the plague. If you want to see it, just watch the first episode, which was the best one, and then forget about watching beyond that. I wish this had been better, I really do. But this show is just utterly awful.

Series rating: 2/10