Westernized takes on Japanese media are hardly anything new. They've been around from The Magnificent Seven to The Ring—go ask what the original Star Wars was based on sometime. So something that might seem so profoundly anime in its iteration as Kakegurui could be fine for reversioning. Homura Kawamoto and Tōru Naomura's manga has already been adapted into an anime and a Japanese live-action drama. That means that Simon Barry's take on the material is theoretically freed from needing to be a definitive adaptation, placed as but a curiosity for fans of the original with few expectations from the start. Yet, even with that potentially liberating caveat, what we still found ourselves with was this: the often baffling, only occasionally amusing BET. Get it, like that thing the kids say?

The sheer weirdness of BET's vibes begins and ends with the fealty it still displays to Kakegurui. Yumeko looks like Yumeko. Characters sport noticeably adapted names like Ryouta becoming "Ryan" or Itsuki becoming "Suki." Mary is there. Runa of all characters makes the transition nearly one-to-one. The characters wear the bright red blazers of the school uniforms, with the consigned house pets donning tags styled after the anime iterations, down to vertically oriented text. It all looks the part, which only drives up the impact of the divergences and discrepancies that might have been lessened had this series only been loosely "inspired by" the source material. At best, it feels like a parody of adapted anime, like the jokes people make about a hypothetical "4kids" version of Chainsaw Man where Denji is named Denny. At worst, it feels like this was at some point meant to be a full-throated live-action adaptation of Kakegurui before executives saw how Netflix's Cowboy Bebop was received, got cold feet, and hastily rejiggered the title and some other elements into the awkward cross-cultural homunculus that's shambled onto screens here.

Not being, and not needing to be, a slavish adaptation of Kakegurui still can't distract from all that BET gets wrong about the appeal of its inspirational work. It's easy to start by taking Yumeko, for instance. If you were thinking that what the central character from Kakegurui needed was some poignant parental-death pathos, then this is the show for you. Yumeko starts off presenting as the gambling-focused force of nature the character is iconic for being, but even early on, she loses her edge after the audience sees her origin. She's still mysterious to the other characters at first, but viewers get to witness her angsting through the window over her parents exploding in a car bomb as she explicitly swears revenge. She grapples with morality and stresses over the success of her schemes despite her thrill in the inherent chance of gambling. Occasionally, Miku Martineau will lose an excited squeak in the direction of something gambling-related in service of her compulsions. But it's practically obligatory, as BET's Yumeko slips extremely noticeably into being a more conventional heroine as the show goes on. She's attempting to be a significantly more human and relatable character for an audience thought to demands that their characters be human and relatable.

BET has no obligation to adhere to Kakegurui canon in this, but it still makes for unflattering comparisons when proven alternate versions are ripe for review. It is admittedly amusing for Ryan to have a more multifaceted arc, given how much of an audience-viewpoint cipher Ryota was in the original. But then the writing attempts to affect this kind of dimensionality in characters like their Midari stand-in, Dori, who chafes under troubled-kid parental issue pleas for sympathy. She isn't even actually missing an eye. She also embodies the way that BET was never going to be able to pull off the manic psychosexuality of Kakegurui, landing instead on "comically uncomfortable" as seen in Dori's attempts at hitting on the character of Michael. Oh yeah, BET is also embarrassingly straight for a Kakegurui adaptation, though it does include some passes at queer romance with its take on Mary. Eve Edwards in that role seems to be the only one who properly understood the assignment, doing a solid job of embodying Mary's irreverent mercenary approach to relationships and ladder-climbing. It's helped by the fact that Mary already had more of those layers that BET clearly wants in its CW-ass character writing.

BET is shooting for that sort of characterization even as its writing and acting largely aren't up to the task. It also tries to infuse itself with a sense of outrageousness that should come from adapting an anime about a boarding school governed by life-or-death gambles. The original Kakegurui was hardly high drama—it was trashy, exploitative, over-the-top fun. But BET can't land in that zone. It hardly seems interested in the high-stakes gambles themselves. Virtually all of the complex contests from Kakegurui, which existed to take up multiple episodes of characters meticulously breaking down and manipulating their systems for themselves, have been stripped out. In their place are basic card face-offs, lie detector tests, and duels so simple that the rules narration jokes about how stupidly simple they are. Gaming often takes a backseat to whatever personal drama the show is trying and failing to present, such as in one episode where Ryan and Yumeko grapple with the weight of murderous revenge in an explosive assassination attempt, dissonantly backed by a B-plot about a BET on Ryan losing his virginity. At which point I jumped up and shouted "Wait a minute, this is just Riverdale!"

Once you realize that's all this show is trying to be, that what showrunner Simon Barry saw in Kakegurui was not a specifically loved story that cried out for adaptation but a convenient framework that this particular flavor of unhinged teen drama could be draped over, a lot of things fall into place. BET's moment-to-moment writing is designed for a stereotype of Netflix's viewership. It's second-screen-friendly with games that aren't so complicated you have to pay attention to them being played, and characters regularly reiterating key plot points like Yumeko's unique transfer status or what "Kakegurui" means. There are shocking cliffhanger endings that turn out to be hallucinated fake-outs at the beginning of the next episode.

It might almost make BET worth watching as a train-wreck if any of this were presented competently. The series attempts to use active split-screens and pop-up effects to inject some dynamism, but those can't paper over the so-so cinematography and direction. There aren't as many Dutch angles being deployed as in Netflix's Cowboy Bebop, but they're still ill-advisedly noticeable. Sets look small, costumes look cheap, and any attempts at more interesting lighting or effects are in service of moments that might as well be out-of-context jokes; watch as characters are silhouetted and their love blossoms to a slowed-down version of Haddaway's "What Is Love."

It's telling that the times BET springs to life is when it is more closely attempting to emulate Kakegurui. Later in the series, the characters discover a secret club room with the games that were actually played in the original anime, with Yumeko and Mary stepping up to challenge the famous finger-guillotine game. For too brief a moment, the air crackles with the psychosexual thrill of high-stakes gambling, Yumeko's unhinged compulsions toward it, and Mary's embracing of living for that excitement. It gets it for just an instant, before that plot crescendos and the characters are whisked away to a retreat that isn't even at the academy for the final two episodes. Yumeko gets her climactic face-off with Kira, its energy sapped into unintentional comedy as both characters attempt to play blackjack while zonked out on poisoned bourbon. You win some, you lose a lot more.

That's the way of gambling, and that's the way of BET. It's hardly concealing what a mediocre hand it has. Being a westernized, live-action take on Kakegurui is but one gimmick it ante up with in a desperate bid for attention, but nothing else it does after that works. This is a series where a character gets into a fight with Seth Rollins in a beaver mascot costume. It's a show with a late-game revelation that Yumeko's parents were murdered because they scammed the school board with a cryptocurrency rug pull. The final episode ends on a Rickroll. BET is not a real show, not one worth watching as a curiosity for Kakegurui fans, nor for people just looking for entertaining TV, trashy or otherwise.