A near-perfect fantasy TV show on Netflix is not just a satisfying watch; it’s elevating an entire genre. Of all the streaming platforms, Netflix has the most interest in putting out new fantasy TV shows, and though for years I’ve complained about their tendency to end shows after too short a runway, they’ve recently combated that stereotype.
Netflix has been lending a longer leash to its fantasy TV shows, and one of its more recent titles has explored television in a way that a lot of similar series have tried and failed to. It’s a fantastic example of what can happen when Netflix lets a showrunner be as “weird” as they want, and hew as close to the original as they can.
One Piece is an odd franchise to adapt into live-action. The original Japanese manga debuted in 1997 and has not stopped running since, becoming one of the longest manga ever by volume count. An anime quickly followed in 1998, and is also still airing, and is equally as unending.
It’s not a story that seems to lend itself to big live-action Netflix storytelling just on the breadth of the plot alone. Then you learn what the series is about, and it seems even more impossible to film. One Piece follows Monkey D. Luffy, a pirate, and his crew, called the Straw Hats, as they search for a mythical treasure known as the “One Piece”.
Luffy’s body is like rubber, and he can expand and twist it like silly putty to battle his many rivals on the high seas, and this body-twisting young man is not even close to the strangest character in the series. One Piece is filled with amazing, fantastical characters who could go so wrong in live-action.
One Piece manages to put them on screen in all their glory, though, and for its efforts, it’s become one of the best TV shows on Netflix and the high watermark for anime adaptations. If One Piece can make a live-action fantasy adaptation so well, nothing should stop other shows from getting the same treatment.
What One Piece Does Better Than Other Live-Action Animation Adaptations
One Piece made a crucial decision that has elevated it above other live-action animation adaptations, and that’s that the series is not embarrassed or afraid of its source material. Even though we’ve come a long way from the days of showrunners trying to shoehorn reality into inherently unreal worlds, it’s still not perfect.
It can still be a high hurdle for showrunners to get over, leaning into the absurdity of an anime, manga, or any cartoon under the broad fantasy umbrella. It rarely works, trying to split the difference between adhering to the strangeness of a text and making an adaptation palatable to an audience uninterested in bizarre elements of a show like One Piece.
What a lot of live-action fantasy adaptations end up doing when they avoid leaning into their source is that they remove the reasons a piece of media has so many fans in the first place. At the same time, they don’t bring in a substantial new audience to make up for the one they lost.
Netflix’s One Piece is a show made by fans of the anime and manga, people who aren’t embarrassed by a sawfish-nosed villain or a tiny anthropomorphic reindeer who is also a doctor. Fans of the manga and anime can sense this respect for the material, and new fans understand when they are watching a show that’s been crafted without a cynical eye towards how a show can be sold to the largest possible audience.
- Release Date
-
August 31, 2023
- Network
-
Netflix
- Showrunner
-
Matt Owens, Steven Maeda, Joe Tracz
- Directors
-
Tim Southam, Marc Jobst, Josef Kubota Wladyka
- Writers
-
Tiffany Greshler, Diego Gutierrez, Allison Weintraub, Lindsay Gelfand
-
Iñaki Godoy
Monkey D. Luffy
-
