‘Cowboy Bebop’ Canceled By Netflix After One Season

Just weeks after the high-profile series debuted, Netflix has already canceled their live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop. The show will end after producing just one season of ten episodes. Although the series was highly anticipated and based on a hugely popular anime, Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop received tepid reviews from fans and critics. (The show currently has a 46 percent score from critics and a 54 percent score from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes.)

On Netflix’s recently unveiled Top 10s website, where they publish lists of their most popular films and shows around the world, it hasn’t been faring well either. This week, after just about 20 days of release, it was ranked ninth, with about 15.2 million hours viewed. That sounds like a lot but the number one show on Netflix last week, Lost In Space was viewed for some 47.3 million hours, more than three times as much. It was doing about the same in the United States, where it was also the ninth most-viewed show behind things like School of Chocolate, Selling Sunset: Season 4, and CoComelon: Season 4.

Netflix first announced the live-action version of Cowboy Bebop in November of 2018, with John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, and Daniella Pineda being cast as Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, and Fate Valentine the following April. Christopher Yost, known as a writer of comics and animated series for Marvel and later a co-writer of Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok before working on The Mandalorian, developed and executive produced the series.

While the show’s visuals were praised for their resemblance to the original animated series, the plots, characters, and scripts were all subject to significant criticism. The entire show is still streaming on Netflix — and so is the original anime, if you prefer to watch that instead.