Cowboy Bebop Season 1 Review

December 24, 2021 at 6:44am
By Jason Stettner

This is a Netflix Original Series that is a live action take on the anime. For context, I’ve never watched the source material so I was going in fresh on this IP when viewing this series. I actually quite enjoyed the characters, and the start of this one. It’s quite neat, completely over the top and whimsically campy.

That being said it does continue to get rougher as time goes on with some cringe like dialogue and various story bits that feel as though they skip along at times. It seems like some episodes just randomly start in places, perhaps a style of the series but it was very odd as the overall story did continue while something entirely different was going on. That did makes things slightly harder to follow at times, but this was a fairly straight forward narrative driven experience.

I just wish this was more cohesive, and had a stronger overall design to it. Some of the side characters were also very weird, and almost out of place at times. Like it’s very strange, ever so strange with some really out there episodes. They also did the classic Netflix, let’s throw in a flashback story randomly bit as well which I felt hurt the core pacing that was going on.

The strongest element of the show, was definitely the characters. John Cho really delivered on Spike Spiegel, being a really cool and generally kick ass type of character. The jacket was particularly fantastic. I also quite enjoyed the strong presence of Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and the overly quirky Faye Valentine (Daniellea Pineda). She was quite fun overall, though at times perhaps a bit much.

I think for most of the characters it was really the strange writing and sometimes straight up bizarre lines that damaged their performances. I felt that Vicious (Alex Hassell) was a bit too much and I never was sure what was going on with Julia (Elena Satine). There were of course many other side characters present, but not really anyone too memorable to mention. The side bits were mostly small appearances here or there, or one off scenarios as the episodes were largely almost random in how they fit together.

I did love the visuals of the show, the space places were such a weird mix of low budget with super solid sci-fi CGI. It looked really neat, sort of this weird twist on cyberpunk. I suppose that was the goal of the world since it’s these splintered off places to resemble Earth. In general I liked how they were presented, always somewhere fresh across the travels.

The Conclusion

Cowboy Bebop Season 1 is fun, a tad crazy and perhaps a bit too strange to really knock it out of the sci-fi park. I quite enjoyed the opening portion of the show, but I did feel that it went off a bit of a cliff as things progressed. They really didn’t seem to know what to do with Faye, and I thought that was a bit of a shame.

The two core leads were well developed, and like others on the show just given some really out there dialogue at times. I enjoyed the camp to a degree, but even that at times was perhaps taken too far. Match that with a really silly plot that only got worse and more nonsensical as time went on for what was an underwhelming effort.

There’s some good performances here, some fun moments and well done action. I actually feel somewhat bad for John Cho as he really seemed to go all out for this one. With that, the age gap between him and Pineda was somewhat odd as the energy matched each other but they seemed so distant in visible age.

That might be odd to mention, but some scenes where they were going over what they had in common seemed like it would be more natural if they were of similar ages. Anyways, as someone that never watched the anime I did enjoy a good amount of this. At the same time, I definitely had some problems with the structuring and many elements of the show that continued to add up over its run time.

Cowboy Bebop Season 1 Review at Home with Streamed Viewing
Screening was Provided by Netflix

Rating Overall: 6.0