Netflix, perhaps due to their overwhelming surplus of cash, has made many attempts to make their own TV series, and some of them are actually quite good, objectively and subjectively. Neo Yokio, an animated Netflix original show consisting of 6 episodes, however, does not fit into this category. Neo Yokio doesn’t qualify as bad, because it’s quite entertaining but it’s certainly not good. Much like the show itself, I can’t seem to place just what this series is. It’s completely neutral.
The plot can be summarized in the adventures of high society demon hunter Kaz Kaan and his attempts at being the #1 most eligible bachelor in the city of Neo Yokio, a combination city of New York and Tokyo, which is apparently ranked on a bachelor board in Times Square.
The show features voice acting from sme well known people, including Jaden Smith (who voices the main character, Kaz), Jude Law (who voices Kaz’s robot butler Charles) and Susan Sarandon (who voices the main character’s aunt, Aunt Agatha. All of these are spectacular actors on their own, and this adds to what makes this show so quirky, which I will address later.
The series was entirely created by Ezra Koenig, a name you may or may not recognize, depending on the kind of music you listen to. He’s the lead singer and guitarist of Vampire Weekend, an indie rock band. This may inspire you to ask “Who the hell decided to give him a Netflix series and why?” I wish I could answer that question for you. I truly do not know who decided that it would be a good idea to have a indie rock singer direct and create a TV series.
Now is the show entertaining and interesting? Yes and no. Much like just about every part of this show, there is some very interesting and entertaining things in this show and then there are parts that… aren’t. The first two episodes of this series are very well done, if slightly stupid, but are very effective at hooking people into the series and getting them intrigued. It has a great hook, an interesting plot in the episode itself, the characters develop properly like they should, the villains are entertaining enough. Then, all of a sudden, after the first two episodes, the show just takes a complete nosedive and bounces it’s face off the concrete. It’s almost like the first two episodes were written by a completely different person, but they weren’t.
This leads me to my biggest issue with this show; IT CAN’T SEEM TO DECIDE WHAT IT WANTS TO BE. At times, it sounds and feels like it wants to be a social commentary on how stupid materialism is, and then Kaz, the main character, immediately shuts it down. Other times I wonder if it was some sort of attempt at an animated version of the popular Supernatural series, bu then after the first two episodes the demon slaying part of this series completely vanishes. Then I wonder if it’s supposed to be an intriguing, long and spread out series like Dragon Ball or Naruto, but then you see that it only has 6 episodes. This show doesn’t know what it wants to be, and I can’t tell what it wants to be. It is so many things but it’s also so few things at the same time.
What worries me about this series is that it COULD be good. It has all the components of a potentially good series. It’s got an incredibly star studded cast, it has a interesting enough overall plot, it has pretty decent quality animation. It has the makeup of a great possible show. Yet, somehow, even with all of these great factors of the series, they just can’t mesh the components together to make it create a good series. It just ends up in this weird limbo of not knowing what it wants to be, and having all the potential to be good, making it unrankable. I can’t say it’s Bad Bad or any of the other possible rankings. It’s just completely neutral in terms of quality. That being said, I appear to be one of the few people that actually enjoyed the series, so maybe it doesn’t have any real subjective entertainment either. It lands right in the middle of the ranking spectrum. It’s not bad or good, it kind of just… exists.
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