In 1998, Studio Sunrise created a new property to rival their prior success of Gundam. Set in the open frontier of space, framed like the mythic outlaw age of the Wild West, Cowboy Bebop was an epic depicting the adventures of small crew in a large universe, effortlessly weaving comedy and pathos with action using some of the most gorgeous animation and bombastic music that had been seen on television.

We are not talking about that show.

Over twenty years later, Netflix decided to try and recreate Sunrise's masterpiece with bloated episode runtimes, scripts they dug out from the dumpster behind the studio, a casting director who I must charitably assume was drunk at the time, and a few million dollars.

As a great man once said, we watched it so you don't have to.

Three episodes in, we are already scraping the bottom of th ...