Stream It Or Skip It?

Comic book adaptations into live-action television are always tricky, but manga adaptations — especially ones done outside of South Asia — are even trickier. The characters in manga stories are designed to be over-the-top and at times are more known for their quirkiness than any kind of depth of character. How to translate that into a live-action series that doesn’t feel cartoonish is tough. A good example is Bet, an adaptation of a manga about a high schooler who is a compulsive gambler going to a prep school full of people wagering their parents’ money.

BET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In detention at a public high school, we see a teen named Yumeko (Miku Martineau). Her voice over says, “My name is Yumeko. And I’ve been bad.”

The Gist: Yumeko is in detention for gambling on school grounds, but that doesn’t prevent her from getting a group together, including the teacher in charge of detention, to start a poker game. She knows everyone’s playing style and tells, and when she wins big, the principal walks in and promptly expels her.

Her guardian, Mrs. Kawamoto (Christine Okuda Hara), comes and gets her, telling her that their plan is going well, and she’s already enrolled at St. Dominic’s, a prep school that “has produced some of the most despicable people on the planet,” says Mrs. Kawamoto. “You are going to war in a place where your opponents control the battlefield.”

Gambling is a way of life at St. Dominic’s, and the Student Council are the top winners at the school, led by council president Kira (Clara Alexandrova). They make the rules of the games played. The students gamble with the stipends their parents give them; anyone who falls into the red, “below the line” becomes a “housepet” to the person they owe money to.

Yumeko becomes friends with Ryan (Ayo Solanke), who becomes a housepet after losing a round of cards to a council member named Mary (Eve Edwards). She also meets Michael (Hunter Cardinal), who refuses to participate in the wagering madness and encourages Yumeko to do the same. But gambling is the very reason why Yumeko is there; in fact, right after she meets her new roommate, she bets her $10,000 that she’ll willingly switch beds by the end of the day.

Yumeko immediately challenges Mary to a match; the game chosen is “Skirmish,” where each player plays one of their seven cards, and the high card in that round wins. Yumeko notices that Mary is cheating, and only wants to play fair. But, as we see in flashbacks to her childhood in Japan, winning money isn’t the only reason why she’s at St. Dominic’s; she wants revenge.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Bet is Elite, but with more gambling. Simon Barry created the series, which is based on the manga Kakegurui by Homura Kawamoto and Tôru Naomura.

Our Take: The best thing we can say about Bet is that it plays out like an almost literal live-action take on its source material. What we mean by that is that the series is full of cartoonish characters, many of whom have little in the way of real human characteristics, The show isn’t trying to establish any characters that are sympathetic; even Yumeko is so mysterious that she’s more of an avatar than anything else. The only real characteristics she has are that she’s good at what she does, she always wants to play fair, and she wants to get revenge on who killed her parents.

It’s easy to dismiss Bet as a show that’s chock full of unlikable characters, but that’s not what ultimately turned us off. In fact, given Mrs. Kawamoto’s speech about the school in the cold open, we were expecting the school to be full of despicable people. And if they have to be despicable, they might as well be comic-book-style despicable. Ryan even describes Kira’s sister Riri (Anwen O’Driscoll) as the result “if Bane and the Terminator had a baby.”

No, what annoys us about Bet is that it’s so busy being stylish that it forgets about the fact that there is a story that needs to be told. If the first episode is any indication, episodes will consist of one face-off after another, characters giving sneering and sniveling speeches, and lots of expositional dialogue of the type that weighed down the first episode.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As she looks across the campus at a person in a window, Yumeko responds to Ryan asking her if she enjoys taking the money of these privileged students. She replies that “I’m out for blood.”

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Ayo Solanke as Ryan because why not?

Most Pilot-y Line: When Yumeko introduces herself to the council, the eye patch-wearing Dori (Aviva Mongillo) says, “I had a pet weasel named Yumeko. He died in a clothes dryer.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s nothing wrong with being a stylish show, but Bet‘s concentration on style overwhelms any kind of substance, making the show a chore to watch over a 10-episode season.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.