Netflix's Cowboy Bebop and how our remake everything culture hurts TV

(This is a short sequel to my biweekly recaps of Cowboy Bebop, the animated series that ran from 1998 to 1999 to much acclaim. If you want to read those recaps, in which I discovered how much I love that show, they are available to paid subscribers.)

For a long time, one of my TV criticism adages was that a great cast will hold an audience for a season one, but you'd better have excellent writing after that. Of course, ideally, you'll have excellent writing and a great cast throughout, but if I had to bet the farm on only one element in a first season, I might go with the actors. People love compelling stories, but they love watching compelling people even more. (I wrote more about this back in 2017.)

In another world, one where it was a completely original show not based on anything, Netflix's 2021 remake of Cowboy Bebop likely would have offered a compelling argument for my theory. The season's writing is all over the place, but the show's three core performers — John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, and Daniella Pineda — all have charisma to burn. By the second half of the season, the three have gelled into an impressive core ensemble, and they have a truly adorable dog to boot. I've overlooked a lot more for shows with charismatic actors and a dog.

Yet we don't live in that world. We live in a world where Cowboy Bebop (2021) exists in the shadow of Cowboy Bebop (1998), and in that world, there is nothing the show can do to escape that shadow. Even a fantastic cast (and there are exceptions, which we will get to) isn't enough. If you love the original show, as I do, then this show feels a little like the 2019 Lion King remake version of it.

That's pretty harsh. The 2021 Bebop is much better than the 2019 Lion King, and I would have gladly watched a second season had it not been canceled. Yet everything about the new Bebop feels as though it's trying to capture what made the original special and to ensure that we know it's being made in the 2020s. Sometimes, that's more or less welcome, as with the non-binary performers the show cast to play characters like Gren and Ed. And sometimes, it feels like the show is scared to admit it's based on a series that was animated. The color palette has been dulled. The images are often a little chintzy. When the series goes over the top, it most often feels like a completely random creative choice rather than something deliberate, as in the original series. It is, in short, both too slavishly faithful and not slavishly faithful enough. And if you are familiar with the original series, that can be hard to square.

‎But what if you weren't familiar with the original series?

If you look at the Metacritic reviews of the series, it sure seems as though people who had never seen the anime had a much better time with the Netflix series. Even fans of the anime seem able to admit that Cho and Shakir, at least, are great choices to play Spike and Jet. (Pineda's take on Faye draws a more mixed reaction, but I really liked her once the show settled down.) So if you aren't constantly comparing everything else to what came before, you might be able to more easily vibe on what the actors are bringing, as often happens in first-season shows that aren't all there yet.

(Here, I will note that Alex Hassell's work as Vicious just does not work for me and that the show's insistence on blowing up the Vicious/Julia plot so it can thread through all 10 episodes is one of its key weaknesses. There's just not enough meat on that bone.)

But Cowboy Bebop isn't a first-season show in the minds of many of those who watch it. For those of us who have seen the original series, it's effectively a second or even third season. It doesn't matter that most episodes directly riff on episodes of the original show or that this series has clearly rethought certain aspects. (Faye, for instance, dresses much more practically.) All that matters is that we've entered a space where familiarity breeds contempt. We know what to expect, and it's easy to feel trapped by that.

It would be one thing if this Bebop had a take on the material that marked it as a new riff on old ideas. That might appeal more to new viewers than preexisting fans, but at least it would be something with a point-of-view. This remake, however, gets caught in a trap of not knowing who it's for.

That trap is one many remakes fall into, and it speaks to why television struggles so much when it becomes a brand extension. To some degree, the first season of a TV show is all about the thrill of discovery. We're exploring uncharted territory alongside writers who are figuring out what their shows can do, and if the cast guiding us along is fun to watch, we're willing to give that show a lot of leeway. A first season is a possibility space. The edges of the map are not yet known to us.

Yet, in a remake, we do know the edges of the map. If this version of Bebop suddenly featured a lot of different space aliens, it would violate the original show in some way I can't even pin down. All remakes are caught in between their source material and their ideal versions of themselves. Yet that snare grows a little tighter in modern remakes, which are beholden more than ever to fandoms that have very specific ideas of what their favorite properties are. As such, there is no thrill of discovery. There is only anger at discovery, at the feeling that we've been tricked onto a different map than the one we started on.

I found the Bebop remake fascinating. It made so many bold creative choices, but none of them quite worked in concert with each other. It offers a reminder of how much the original show's success stemmed from a series of decisions that should have produced total incoherence but, instead, created something utterly itself. The remake tries to recapture that series of decisions and add a few of its own to the pile. Yet the tower topples over under its own weight.

There's perhaps no better example of this than the final scene of the whole season, in which the show introduces its version of Ed, a screaming child who turns up to tell Spike about a job. The scene in which Ed first appears briefly went viral on Twitter, with many asking what the fuck was going on. I saw that scene sans context before I had seen either Bebop, and I thought, "Well, maybe this works better in context." And having seen the anime, I had a vague idea that that spin on Ed could work. Yet, at the end of the remake, the arrival of a screaming child feels utterly incongruous with everything that's come before. Suddenly, there's just an Ed, and they seem like they're starring in a different TV show entirely.

‎Can that work? Of course. But by the end of the remake, the show has tried so many things tonally that this just feels like whiplash, especially when the series keeps trying to be both episodic and serialized in a way where neither storytelling style gets room to take root.

I would have watched another season of this show, maybe even several more seasons. I started out a huge skeptic of most of it, but eventually, it won me over in enough ways that I probably would have enjoyed seeing more of it. And yet, as I watched it, I felt that sinking sense I get watching too much TV now, the sense that drove me away from writing TV criticism: This show is only about another show. The Cowboy Bebop remake has its moments, but it is only ever interested in telling me things I already know in a slightly different voice. What is this show trying to say about the world? I'm not convinced it's much of anything.

Talk back to me: What do you make of TV remakes? Do you have a favorite? Bonus points if you can name something other than The Office or Battlestar Galactica. (I might pick Jane the Virgin.) Tell me in the comments or by replying to this email!

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: Karina Solomon's take on Isabel Sandoval's excellent film Lingua Franca is a compelling read of a film that I love.

Lingua Franca portrays transness as an intrinsic part of a storyline about getting multiple chances. It is a tale about the unique process a trans character undergoes to live more in alignment with her authentic self.  Sandoval (who wrote, directed, and stars as Olivia) created a trans protagonist making a living off of a low-risk under-the-table job rather than relying on the cliché of trans folks surviving by doing life-threatening sex work. Sandoval even chose an adorable, albeit sometimes feisty, elderly white Jewish lady as Olivia’s client, another deviation from the overused narrative of abusive relational dynamics between domestic workers and their employers.

Read me: My former colleague and friend of the pod Kelsey McKinney has a great piece at Defector about how Sydney Sweeney's need to keep on hustling indicates how broken our society is.

You can always tell who in Hollywood has family money by their Instagrams. People like Dakota Johnson, who have a Hollywood lineage deeper than the Mariana Trench, post only rarely. They post about social justice causes they care about, or personal announcements. Even someone like actress and musician Maya Hawke mostly posts previews of upcoming projects, or selfies on Jimmy Fallon—self-promotion, with some personalized aspects. An actress like Sydney Sweeney, who grew up in Spokane, Wa. and lived in a motel with her whole family while trying to make an acting career work, has a very different-looking feed. Sweeney is not really any less famous than her legacy peers after her roles in Euphoria, The White Lotus, and The Handmaid’s Tale. She has, at age 24, been working steadily in Hollywood for 10 years; her performance in the most recent season of Euphoria earned her an Emmy nomination. Sweeney posts almost constantly, and almost half of her posts are advertisements.

Watch me: I sometimes enjoy these Wired "we ask you what people want to know about you on Google" interviews, and I found this one with John Cho and Daniella Pineda charming. So you get to watch it too!

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And another thing... If you enjoy following my tabletop role-playing exploits, I'm currently GMing a Kids on Brooms game for Happy Jacks. The premise is that a bunch of kids at a trans-affirming magic school in California find themselves trying to escape the pernicious influence of a much less accepting "British school." I'm having a blast running it. Watch the full run (so far) here.

Opening credits sequence of the week: I don't know why the Netflix Bebop so faithfully recreated the original credits but also didn't get them shot-for-shot correct, but I guess that's just the show in a nutshell.

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A thing I had to look up: I spent a long time figuring out the various creative personnel behind the scenes on this show, only to use almost none of that information. The showrunner seems to have been Andre Nemec, who has worked as showrunner on a lot of shows I wanted to like more than I did.

This week's reading music: "Out of Vogue" by Fever Dolls

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.