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Forum - View topicREVIEW: BET Live-Action Streaming Series Review
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 816 Location: PA / USA |
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I'm floored because Simon Barry did Continuum about a decade ago, and every. single. person. NEEDS. to. watch. that. show, in or out of Canada given its subject matter and how practically everything is more or less following that show 1:1 in current events right now.
....and then we get BET in 2025. Wut? |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 5167 Location: New York |
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Simon Barry is nothing short of a slopmaster. He takes comics and manga that have interesting ideas and cheeky executions, and the end result is bland, boring, and just plain not fun to watch. He did it to Warrior Nun, turning a cheeky girls with guns comic starring a character who is very firm in her morals to contrast some of Dunn's other works, into a bland, stereotypical, and ugly to look at show that it was no wonder it got canceled. And now they did the same with Kakegurui, taking all the fun and color out of the original and replacing it with a very stereotypical revenge concept, not to mention one of the most outright bizarre attempts at brand synergy I've ever seen in a show.
So they're teasing a secret bodyguard for Runa running around in a beaver costume for a while, until one of the main guys runs into him. Is this character someone from the manga who hasn't been introduced yet? A character we're already familiar with? No, it's spoiler[Seth Freaking Rollins. The pro wrestler. Playing himself. Apparently, Runa hired the actual Seth Rollins, put him in that costume, and had him beat up minors. And Seth's totally cool with doing this between Raw episodes and house shows.]. Even for a show as off tonally as this was, that was just weird. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 20109 |
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If I had a nickel for every Western live-action adaption of a Japanese property that robbed said property of everything that made it unique and fun in favor of typical Westernized storytelling, writing, or emulating other Western shows...I'd have too many nickels to be honest.
I feel bad for the cast though, they got stuck with this when they were ultimately just doing their best. |
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 869 |
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I've not watched Kakegurui but I saw this on Netflix last night, watched the preview*, then watched the preview* for Kakegurui itself since it's also on Netflix and thought "ohhh there's about to be some angry fans of this here"
It's so weird though, I thought after live-action One Piece got a ton of praise that Netflix had learned their lesson. Guess not! *Not real preview, just the clips that play when you hover too long on Netflix, you know what I mean. |
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zztop
Posts: 715 |
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Iirc for the live action One Piece, Oda Eiichirou made sure he was very involved with the production. I do not think Kawamoto Homura did the same, leaving everything to Mr Barry. |
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groovysunbeam
 Posts: 82 Location: Belgium |
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One Piece still had plenty of issues and made tons changes from the source material. People were just apparently willing to look past that. We'll see if that keeps up for season 2 and beyond. |
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Pokenatic
 Posts: 642 Location: Neo Venezia |
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As someone who watched and loved Kakegurui, I was going into this expecting something cringey bad along the lines of Netflix's Death Note movie. Having seen the first half of the series, I was floored by how the series managed to not even meet that expectation by a good margin.
There's so many things I could say about Bet. The first thing is, the first 3 episodes managed to be an incredibly tepid adaptation of Kakegurui up to Yumeko's meeting Midori. Kakegurui was over the top crazy, while somehow managing to be pretty clever with aspects of the plot being metaphors on various things. Bet, on the other hand, feels pretty bland, and shallow (how the hell did they keep spoiler[Itsuki's real human nail collection but it doesn't even feel that insane?!] That's not even going into how it comes off as completely random given Suki's characterization). Then you go into episode 4 and Bet has basically abandoned the original work's plot and goes completely in its own direction. Honestly, I'm more open to the thought of them trying to tell their own story with it than it being a slavish, one-to-one adaptation, but it's downright ridiculous to say that it even managed to capture the spirit of Kakegurui in any way. It failed to even emulate the craziness of Kakegurui and it ultimately feels like we just got some random CW show script and they just forced a coat of Kakegurui paint onto it because they have the license. I honestly don't know who this is even supposed to be for, like, it's almost completely alien to Kakegurui for Kakegurui fans, and whoever actually enjoys Bet would almost guaranteed be blindsided by how Kakegurui is straight up entirely a different series. |
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 869 |
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Oh I get that, I'm saying that after that, I'm just surprised that they didn't run stuff by Kawamoto, or (even if Kawamoto didn't care) push Barry to adhere closer to the source material. I don't know what the executives at Netflix are thinking since, like other people have noted, this has happened before and they always end up looking bad. idk, maybe behind the scenes this is actually getting wildly good reviews from actual viewers but it just seems to me like Netflix's attempts at live-action anime adaptations is that one Simpsons gag of Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes, then they found a way out with One Piece... and now they've decided to turn right back to the rakes instead of follow a winning formula.
I mean I'm aware that live-action OP is not a flawless 1:1 translation from the anime/manga, that would be impossible (and probably a bad idea!), I just mean that it attempts to be close to the source material unlike Netflix's Death Note... or Bebop.... or now apparently Bet. |
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Fluwm
Moderator
 Posts: 1629 |
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My recollection of the fan response is that it was fairly tepid. It didn't garner the same intense dislike as other Netflix adaptations, but I don't remember seeing anyone who was all that enthusiastic about it. |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2730 |
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The_Outsider
Posts: 138 |
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Y'know, after the "masterpiece adaptations" that were Electric State and Avatar, is anyone really surprised? Netflix has always been like this, they throw everything and the kitchen sink at the wall to see what sticks (god knows where they get the money)and only a few shows ever actually turn out to be good.
The thing is now they've turned to catering to the tiktok brained generation, no one pays attention to the screen anymore, so why bother with quality anything? |
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Covnam
 Posts: 4398 |
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Reading the title while scrolling, I definitely thought this was a review for a new series on BET (the channel) for a moment
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Beatdigga
Posts: 5167 Location: New York |
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The thing that gets me is that if you count the Japanese and Korean adaptations of manga, manwha, and webtoons even if you don't count One Piece and the Kenshin films that were already finished when Netflix got them, they've actually been on something of a hot streak. Weak Hero, Parasyte the Grey, City Hunter, Yu Yu Hakusho (an abridged version of the series that needed double the episodes, but one that was well acted and had great fight scenes), All of Us are Dead. All of these got really good viewing totals and fairly positive critical responses. I believe we can place all the blame on Simon Barry. He is not good at adaptations, since he rips the soul out of what he adapts to make bland slop. Warrior Nun was slop and so is this. At least this has some scenes that are funny out of context, while Warrior Nun didn't even have that much. |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2563 Location: Online Terminal |
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I think people are trying to walk back the initial reactions to Netflix One Piece to better fit the narrative that Netflix Bad. More than one thing can be true; Netflix Bad, but Netflix One Piece also got a lot correct in terms of overall approach and tone, which in my experience is a more important indicator of overall viewer sentiment. |
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JoseFire
Posts: 14 |
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I’ll play devil’s advocate and say that I do not think the adaptation deserves the hate it gets.
There was some awkward dialogue and many of the jokes didn’t land but I was interested enough to watch until the end. I think the show managed its tension well enough. If by some miracle this gets renewed for a second season, I will watch it. |
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