TV Talk: Point Park grad goes to Mars in Netflix’s live-action ‘Cowboy Bebop’

For Point Park University grad Mason Alexander Park, a recurring role on Netflix’s live-action “Cowboy Bebop,” streaming Friday, finds the actor primarily sharing scenes with Tamara Tunie, a 1981 Carnegie Mellon University drama program grad who was born in McKeesport and raised in Homestead.

Park and Tunie were quarantined a few doors away from one another in the same hotel upon their arrival in New Zealand to film “Cowboy Bebop” mid-pandemic. They Facetimed with one another and, eventually, their shared Pittsburgh backgrounds came up.

“We talked about doing theater in Pittsburgh and the cultural hub that is that Downtown area,” Park said in a phone interview Monday. “I’m so grateful to her, both as an actor and as a friend, for the amount of space and energy that she gave, not only to me, but put into this job [on ‘Cowboy Bebop’], in this role, and we really were kind of attached at the hip.”

Based on the 1998 anime series of the same name, Netflix’s “Cowboy Bebop” follows bounty hunters Spike Spiegel (an unflinchingly cool John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir, who gives the show heart) and Faye Valentine (joyfully spunky Daniella Pineda) as they hunt down criminals. Their adventures occasionally take them to Mars and a bar run by Ana (Tunie) with an assist from the bar’s emcee, Gren (Park), who appears in five of the 10 episodes.

Park has vague memories of seeing episodes of the original “Cowboy Bebop” on Adult Swim at 2 a.m. The Gren in the anime series becomes an intersex person through a non-voluntary situation. For the live-action version, Park said showrunner Andre Nemec wanted to avoid having Gren’s transness be linked to trauma, even in a dystopian future.

“There still is this massive desire for the characters in the show to exist in a world that doesn’t necessarily have prejudice that’s based on race or gender,” said Park, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. “Gren’s character is not defined by their identity, and their gender is not in any way abnormal to futuristic standards. … Gren can still have as complicated of a situation and as complicated of a journey down the line without it necessarily having to be rooted in their body.”

Just look at one-minute-and-three-seconds into the show’s opening credits for an example of this version of Gren, a gun in each hand pointed in opposite directions.

“It really is very cool to see a queer character be able to hold themselves to so much strength and to be able to play by the same rules as everybody else in a series,” Park said. “It’s so very easy to fall into traps and tropes when you have a character like Gren, especially one that works in nightlife. For them to also give Gren this protectiveness and a strength and an intelligence that isn’t always given to queer characters in film and television, I’m very grateful for it. That opening sequence 100% encapsulates it.”

Park appeared in PBS’s three-part 2012 docu-series about the National High School Musical Theater Awards and, through their participation, got to know then-Pittsburgh CLO executive producer Van Kaplan and Point Park dance professor Kiesha Lalama.

“I was looking at a bunch of different colleges, and that was the one that felt most like home to me,” Park said of Point Park.

After college, Park joined the national tour of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” as an understudy to actors who played the title character. It’s a role Park is currently reprising — as the lead — at Maryland’s Olney Theatre Nov. 26-Jan. 2.

In 2022, Park will be seen in another heavily recurring Netflix role, playing Desire in Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman.” And then there’s the possibility of some projects Park is developing as a writer for film and TV and the prospect of potentially more “Cowboy Bebop.” (Netflix has not yet announced a second season.)

“If there is a chance to continue and tell those stories,” Park said, “I’m sure that we will all get to put in some fun time and energy developing those characters.”

More on ‘Bebop’

Critical reactions to Netflix’s live-action “Cowboy Bebop” have been a mixed bag. As a viewer new to “Cowboy Bebop,” I enjoyed many aspects of the Netflix series: the retro production design, jazzy score, bizarre blasts of humor and the lead actors’ performances. The show brings to mind “Firefly,” though it’s really “Firefly” that surely owes a debt to the anime “Bebop.”

The live-action “Bebop” is at its best in episodes three through eight, where the bounty-of-the-week stories build camaraderie among the crew and their adopted Corgi, Ein.

When the show leans more heavily into Spike’s serialized plot, as it does in the last two episodes of the season, “Cowboy Bebop” loses its sense of fun and bogs down in tired soap operatics. Sure, there are climactic battles and big reveals, but it all feels rote, whereas the episodic stories are loose, unpredictable and often a little wacky.

‘Wheel of Time’

Amazon Prime Video’s “Game of Thrones” wannabe “The Wheel of Time,” adapted from the Robert Jordan novels, proves more challenging for a newcomer for reasons complex (viewers are dropped into an unfamiliar society with its own vocabulary, rules and mores) and simple (at times, the dialogue is difficult to understand due partially to accents). It’s also pretty boring.

Streaming Friday, “The Wheel of Time” was developed as a series by Rafe Judkins (a competitor on CBS’s “Survivor” in 2005 and a writer on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) and it takes the whole first episode before it makes much sense.

Set in a place where magic exists, “Wheel” follows Moiraine (Rosamund Pike), leader of the matriarchal Aes Sedai, who seeks out the prophesied Dragon Reborn, who will either save or destroy humanity. Moiraine believes the Dragon is one of a handful of young men and women from an agrarian town. Frustratingly, after bringing them together in the first hour, the show splits them up again by the end of episode two.

“Wheel of Time” is very self-serious, which makes it easy to mock, particularly if you’re apt to make comparisons to other fantasy franchises: One screechy villain has Voldemort’s nose; an Army of horned beasts are this show’s version of Orcs. It’s all slathered on thick with an over-reliance on special effects-heavy battle scenes.

‘Star Trek: Discovery’

Stop me if you’re a “Star Trek” viewer who’s heard this plot: “A threat like none our galaxy has faced before.”

That was the menace of “The Burn” in season three of “Star Trek: Discovery,” and the show introduces a new, slow-moving, mysterious threat in season four, now streaming on Paramount+. It feels like a rehash from the jump, but perhaps it will go somewhere different.

Episodes three and four deliver more episodic stories as the anomaly arc simmers on a back burner. Episode four suggests this new threat might be an allegory for Earth’s response to covid-19, but more concerning for fans will be how the show handles a beloved character’s growth.

Premiere dates

HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” returns for the remainder of its first season Nov. 25. … Season two of HBO’s “How To with John Wilson” debuts at 10 p.m. Nov. 26. … “Sex and the City” sequel series “And Just Like That…” premieres Dec. 9 on HBO Max.

Newly ordered

Former Upper St. Clair resident Tim Federle (showrunner on Disney+’s “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series”) is adapting his own book, “Better Nate Than Ever,” as a Disney+ movie he’s directed that will stream in 2022. The novel follows an ostracized Western Pennsylvania teen who tries to get an audition for a Broadway musical.

Paramount+ ordered a series adaptation of “Fatal Attraction” starring Lizzy Caplan (“Masters of Sex”) in the role made famous by Glenn Close in the 1987 movie.

Alas, it doesn’t appear Caplan will be part of Starz’s “Party Down” revival, which has enlisted original cast members Adam Scott, Jane Lynch, Ken Marino, Martin Starr, Ryan Hansen and Megan Mullally.

Channel surfing

HBO Max has acquired nonexclusive rights to stream the first two seasons of Fred Rogers Productions’ “Odd Squad” in Latin America. … IATSE members, including those in Pittsburgh Local 489, ratified a new three-year contract that will keep cameras rolling on film and TV productions, though it won approval by a narrow margin. … CNN premieres “The Hunt for Planet B” (9 p.m. Sunday) a new documentary about a telescope that will search for signs of life outside Earth’s solar system. … The leads of the “Harry Potter” films — Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson — will reunite with other cast members for a “Friends”-style retrospective, “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts” (Jan. 1, HBO Max).