about the cowboy bebop adaptation

or, how 'bout them Mets?

It’s almost the end of the year. After this, I’ll just have two more posts until January. Next Tuesday, I’m sending out an essay about fatherhood. In two weeks, I’m sending out a sort of wrap up for my year.

they should have named him Cowboy and his fists could have been named Be and Bop.

I was, in very specific ways, wrong about the Cowboy Bebop adaptation.

This is significant because I am never wrong about anything¹.

I also made a fatal mistake (one that thing-likers around the globe should never do) which was to rewatch the anime before the adaptation came out. I mean this quite seriously: if you want to like an adaptation, go into it as blindly as possible. This is also true for reboots and sequels that happen decades² later.

So if you have yet to see the Cowboy Bebop adaptation and have never seen the anime, watch the adaptation first. By every account that I’ve seen on the internet, people who went in blind loved it.

On the other hand, people who loved the anime hate not only the adaptation but also Netflix as a company. I’ve even seen one person typing angrily into the internet about how the adaptation ruins the original, which says terrifying things about chronological time³.

Because I’m a Big Boy and notable thing-liker, I liked the Cowboy Bebop adaptation. It’s fun!

But, I mean, I wouldn’t be writing an essay if that’s all I had to say.

Of course, the recent announcement that the show has already been canceled means this essay is probably a lot of words spent in the service of something most people ignored. But I wouldn’t be writing about the things I write here if I thought anyone cared about my views on popculture.

Let’s get to it: should I watch the adaptation?

Yeah, absolutely. Or, I mean, if you thought it looked good. Maybe even if you thought it looked bad (like me)! The show is a lot of fun! Especially if you just want some bounty hunters in space and haven’t ever seen the original. It’s not like The Mandalorian or Firefly, but it’s also kind of like both of them.

Is it a good adaptation?

No. Not even a little bit. In fact, I think this is the problem with most people’s perception of the show. They’re unable to dissociate the adaptation from the anime (more on this in a minute) and so they’re constantly comparing the two, which rarely comes out in the adaptation’s favor.

We’re talking about what many consider to be the best anime ever made. People’s expectation is, unreasonably, for the adaptation to be the best live action show they’ve ever seen.

The adaptation doesn’t really capture the feeling or texture of the show. It definitely doesn’t capture the rhythm of the show either. Where the anime is a bit loose with its structure, the adaptation dives hard into the Syndicate⁴ narrative simmering beneath the anime with…complicated results.

I think everyone would have enjoyed this show more had they just named it something else. Like Space Cowboys. Do almost everything else the same but change the show’s name and the character names. Yeah, people would have whined about it ripping off a 20 year old cartoon, but no one cares about them. Big as the cartoon was, I would bet that most people I know never even heard of it before this adaptation came out.

But one of the problems with the show is that it very deliberately tries to recreate specific moments from the cartoon, and it rarely leads to a kind comparison. The cinematography of the adaptation is just uglier (more on this later, too) and many of the characters are just written in a more cartoonish way than the cartoon itself. The fight scenes are incomparably weaker, and the execution of many of the stories just don’t work as well.

Cowboy Bebop is a tight show, despite the loose structure. Each episode is like 25 minutes and those minutes are packed full of character, setting, and style. By making the episodes 45-60 minutes long, there’s noticeable slack in the pacing. We’re constantly fan out to keep track of the PLOT, which all Prestige Television requires to be meaty and have real big stakes.

This really is the primary structural difference. Where the anime had a loose relationship with its over-arcing plot (or at least what seems to be the plot⁵) meandering here and there, the adaptation is pretty devoted to its over-arcing plot (which is significantly different than the anime’s and I’d argue is a case of the adapters either missing the point of the source material or just not understanding it). On an episode by episode basis, the anime is a tightly orchestrated ballet, whereas the adaptation is a bit looser and more meandering.

This structural difference isn’t a bad thing! The show works quite well with this different structure. It demonstrates, however, part of why this adaptation fails as an adaptation, even if it works as a show.

Okay, so what’s good about the show? Seems like it got bad reviews from critics and audiences.

Yeah, fair enough. I think part of the problem is that professional and amateur critics refused to take the show on its own terms. They were always viewing it in relation to its source material. Which makes sense. I mean, Netflix invited this comparison often.

The show succeeds in a number of ways, though, and almost all of them come down to two cast members.

But before I get there, I want to mention cinematography.

I said previously that the live action adaptation is uglier. Randomly using Dutch angles doesn’t help.

However! The show really lives in this ugliness and manages to make this its own sort of style. The show looks like it was filmed in the 70s and you’re watching it now on a worn-out VHS. This is…a choice.

But at least they made a choice! I still think it looks a lot worse than the anime, but if we set the anime aside, this has a very Dirty Harry feel to it. And that’s oddly nice! There’s a retrofuturism to the whole thing, and I dig that. Yes, the settings are all sort of flat in their homogeneity, and so much of the vibrancy and diversity of the anime is lost, but I think that’s okay. They own this style and have made it their own.

Anyway: Spike and Jet are what make this show work.

Cowboy Bebop was always all about the characters and their relationships. The trailers for this show demonstrated almost zero chemistry between the cast members, which was a big reason why I wasn’t excited for this.

But, man, Spike and Jet just work. John Cho and Mustafa Shakir just do a great job of inhabiting these characters and bringing them to life. Shakir even sounds like Jet!

I was really not expecting Cho to do so well here. He seemed sort of miserably miscast. After seeing it, I’ve never been so delighted to be so wrong. He captures Spike so well, from swagger to delivery and even in the fight scenes⁶.

And the two actors working together, playing off each other—it’s just great. They feel like people who have lived and worked together for years. There’s a real naturalism captured in their relationship.

I don’t love that they gave Jet a kid. I think this could have worked and I think it would have led to a lot of potential for future seasons. But, as is, it just feels like a plot complicating device thrown into an episode every so often⁷. It’s a change that held lots of potential. Jet was a jaded cop who wasted his life by burning all of his relationships for a career and worldview that only punished him for his loyalty. Taking that same man and giving him a daughter grounds him. Now he’s not just a bounty hunter moving from job to job without any substantial ties to anyone or anything. He has a daughter and she has a home. He has an ex-wife whose new husband was his old friend.

It’s a goddamn story generating machine!

Sadly, not much came of it in this first season. Now that it’s canceled, any potential for this change is just gone.

Of course, the strength of Cho and Shakir leads to an interesting issue.

Because they adapt their characters so faithfully and effortlessly, it makes the rest of the adaptation feel a bit strange. Like Spike and Jet got transported to a different version of reality where everyone else is just a bit different.

You haven’t mentioned Faye yet.

Well, I kind of just did.

This is the first big problem with how the adaptation understood and handled its characters. I’m completely fine with this Faye having no relationship to the original Faye. I think Pineda does a good job with what she’s given. It’s just what she’s given isn’t a whole lot.

I discuss this in my essay about Star Trek: Discovery when I get to Michael Burnham. Everything I said there applies here, but I’ll say it again anyway.

The problem with the adaptation’s version of Faye has nothing to do with making her less pornographic or changing her personality. It has everything to do with writing.

The anime’s Faye is a complicated figure. She’s drawn exclusively to excite the teenage boys watching the anime. Her costumes are ridiculous. Her physique defies physics. But the character herself was actually strong and interesting.

Like Jet and Spike, she’s a deeply wounded and damaged person who has had her life burned down by other people. She’s lost and alone and adrift, stitching a life together by running bounties. She has no friends or family or even connections. Like Spike and Jet, she is a alone. And it is crushing her. Has crushed her.

The adaptation’s Faye hits all those same character notes. It just doesn’t work very well. Some amount of blame probably lands on Pineda, but most of it should land in the writer’s lap.

People do not know how to write strong women. They just don’t. You see it constantly. Faye’s dialogue in the Bebop adaptation feels like it was written by a Joss Whedon quip machine, which is annoying and tedious and not funny. She’s allowed to be strong, but every way she demonstrates strength feels like a man trying to imagine what a man would be like if he was trapped in a sexy lady’s body.

This has been a problem for me in many shows, books, and movies. Many people just write a strong male character and then switch the pronouns. What I mean is that every characteristic that define Faye’s strength are socially coded as male characteristics.

She’s vulgar! She punches people! She fucks! She don’t give a shit!

The adaptation’s Faye isn’t given the space to show the quiet vulnerable strength that the anime’s Faye holds. A big part of this is because of how disastrously the show dropped the ball with her emotional arc. And, I mean, maybe a different actress could have breathed more life into Faye here, but I think the writers really failed her.

They knew how to write Jet and Spike, but they were lost when it comes to women.

Which brings us to the Vicious of it all.

You don’t like Vicious?

Vicious sucks. No, let me rephrase that: Vicious sucked.

Vicious is barely a character in the anime. He’s more like a force of nature. He arrives, causes chaos, and then murders. His power and plans are opaque, shrouded in aspects of the story not shown to the viewer. In this way, he’s a perfect villain.

But he’s not a character.

But the adaptation at least made him a character.

Probably they shouldn’t have, honestly. Giving Vicious more screentime only demonstrates how marginal he is to the actual story being told. But turning him into an emo maniac better suited for a CW show from 2004 just makes him so cringe-inducing I actually found the show difficult to watch whenever we moved back to the Syndicate storyline.

Giving him serious daddy issues, making him a sniveling coward and a rich boy doesn’t really make him more interesting. It just makes him pathetic.

We’re never given a real backstory to Vicious, but the breadcrumbs create a trail that leads back in time to a boy sent to war who found his manhood on the battlefield. He was one of a generation of men sent to a pointless war on a distant moon, only to be dumped back into a fraying and limping civilization cast like a fistful of sand over the solar system.

His only skills were violence and war, so he became a different kind of soldier in a solar system spanning crime syndicate.

That backstory I just sketched out there is never cleanly stated, but we see flashes of his past and come to understand the context of the past almost through osmosis. But that version of Vicious is more interesting than the one we got in the adaptation who chews up hours of screentime where he gets to display three emotions: fear, hate, and shame.

Vicious always sucked as a character because he was never meant to be understood. He’s just a foil to Spike. An inverted version.

And then there’s Julia.

At least they made her a character and gave her agency.

Did they?

She’s a damsel in distress for the first 9.75 hours of the show. That she makes a choice right at the end, which is actually interesting and promised a lot of future potential, doesn’t change the fact that she stands around nervously in expensive clothes for the majority of the show. Just waiting for a hero. Waiting for Spike.

So…you don’t like this show?

It’s complicated, all right? But I do think the first eight hours of the show are a lot of fun. The show falls apart at the end of the season, for the same reasons that every season of Star Trek: Discovery falls apart in its final few hours of each season. Prestige Television Syndrome™ is very real.

And while the changes made to the adaptation almost exclusively make it a worse show than the cartoon⁸, the show still works. It’s fun. It’s easily bingeable.

Yes, Faye ends up being sort of flat and kind of annoying and Vicious and Julia are just disasters, but many shows include such badness. And, I mean, some trash in my broth never kept me from gobbling up my stew.

I say give the show a shot if you liked the trailers. It’s not great, but it’s fun. And sometimes that’s all I want in life. Just a fun show to glow on me for a few hours.

1. As an example: when I was a baby I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and knew it was the greatest movie ever made.

2. Everyone who rewatched the original Star Wars trilogy before watching The Force Awakens had a bad time. This is because the new movie was deliberately trying to conjure the original. This is a cool effect, unless you just watched the original. But if you—like me!—had not seen A New Hope in, like, fifteen years, you would have thought the conjuring of the original was kind of neat!

3. Maybe time is a flat circle.

4. I predicted this very thing!

5. I’d argue that the real arc of Cowboy Bebop is more about family and connection and has almost nothing to do with Vicious or Julia. In many ways, what everyone considers to be the real finale of the show—the death of Julia, the fight with Vicious—is actually an epilogue. The end of the story is when Spike and Jet have one final meal. That’s the end of the story.

Bebop is a show about how the past haunts its characters. Spike’s inability to move on is a failure. It’s not badass that he throws his life away to murder Vicious and a bunch of other people. Julia is dead. She’s dead because of him. Twice over! Him going on one last ride into the maelstrom of violence is not heroic. It is tragic.

Faye, Edward, and Jet are the otherside of this. Faye especially. Haunted by her past, she seeks out the truth of who she was. Finding it, she nearly shatters. But she gets up, returns to the family she’s made on the Bebop to beg Spike not to die. She reckons with her past. She embraces it, takes it in, and accepts it. Then she moves forward.

I hide all this analysis in a footnote because it’s funnier to have it here. And I’m all about commitment to the bit.

6. There was never any possible universe where John Cho was going to be able to fight as fluidly as a cartoon character. But I think he does a good enough job here. The real problem comes down to fight choreography, which is just a disaster in cinema outside China, Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia. Maybe we can add Japan too. But the US is especially terrible at allowing the audience to see and understand a fight. They do almost everything they possibly can to hide the fact that the actors weren’t trained well enough to do fight choreography.

7. I especially hate the cheapness of how Jet’s daughter is used in the finale.

8. I wanted to find a natural place to talk about Gren, but I never found it, so I’ll leave it here.

Gren was my first experience with the fluidity of the gender binary taken seriously. I’ve said elsewhere that Jesse and James from Pokemon blew up the binary for me, and then Kuja from Final Fantasy IX blew up my view of sexual orientations, but Gren was the first character I encountered who really embodied a complicating seriousness to gender, sex, and sexual orientation.

Gren is not a big character and I honestly forgot about him (using these pronouns because those were the ones used in the anime). Rewatching the show in October, I was struck again by how beautiful Gren’s storyline is. Tragic, yes, absolutely, but it haunted me for a long time when I was thirteen, dealing with puberty, with sexual feelings and fantasies.

I understand that some trans and nonbinary people don’t like him as a character, but I know that Gren meant a lot to a lot of people, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. Being thirteen and seeing such a full and honest character who bends ideas that I thought of as concrete and immutable was revelatory. I imagine I’m not the only straight boy who found the world wider and more varied because I discovered Gren late at night in the glow of my TV.

The adaptation recreates Gren as…well, they’re barely in the show. This Gren is somehow less of a character. Less interesting, less clear, and less present, despite spending quite a bit more time on screen. Usually, Gren just stands behind the bar and occasionally delivers a line of dialogue of such inconsequence that I don’t understand why people would prefer this more acceptable version of Gren.

Yes, I understand that the anime’s Gren was complicated and difficult for nonbinary and trans people. Possibly he was even hurtful or demeaning to some.

But is the adaptation’s Gren better? Is this progress? Turning a character, albeit a small yet important one, into nothing more than screen dressing? While Gren being portrayed more clearly as nonbinary and being portrayed by a nonbinary person seems well and good, the show also manages to push Gren almost entirely out of the narrative. Sure, they’re in the show more often and might even have more lines, but I never felt connected to this Gren. Never felt like they needed to be in the story. Never felt like they even had a perspective.

Which is a shame. Because I think this could have been a very powerful story to retell, to recontextualize and make more inclusive.

So it goes.