Like video game adaptations, live-action anime adaptations get a bad rap for being so rancid that fans preemptively sling shit at their creators for having the audacity to attempt them. Having been a card-carrying member of that camp for years, when I tuned into Bet, Netflix’s live-action take on Kakegurui, I expected an irredeemable trainwreck. What I got instead was a surprisingly entertaining, campy fever dream. I take pride in contributing to getting it greenlit for a second season.
Developed by Simon Berry, Bet reimagines Homura Kawamoto and Tōru Naomura’s 2014 psychological drama series Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler. The original manga follows Yumeko Jabami, a precocious high school transfer student at a prestigious academy where one’s social status is determined by underground gambling. Think Yu-Gi-Oh’s early manga chaos meets Kaiji’s debt-riddled death games. The anime adaptation by Mappa in 2017 catapulted the series into pop culture prominence, and I even ranked it as the 30th best anime of the decade at the other website.
Visually, Bet is Netflix’s CW-esque answer to Riverdale with BBC’s Sherlock levels of overproduction. Its set design and costuming go hard—like, somebody put their whole bussy into it hard. Sure, the show is still campy and wacky, just like its source material, but it leans into that chaos rather than apologizing for it. Unlike Hollywood's more infamous anime misfires (cough cough Dragon Ball Evolution and The Last Airbender), Bet embraces its eccentricity with pride, and while being a more palatable thing to have folks walk in on you watching than its anime.
Bet doesn’t just cosplay the source material—it remixes it by Americanizing it in the most contemporary camp way possible. And in doing so, Bet fixes things that even the manga and anime never quite nailed. Mainly, how it handled adapting three characters from the source material.
First off is actor Miku Martineau’s Yumeko. In the anime, she’s a manic enigma who gets turned on by the danger of gambling even when the odds are stacked against her. With each episode, she inexplicably wins every game (even when her opponents are cheating), making the viewing experience bereft of emotional stakes. Bet gives her gravity. While she’s still as much a thrill-seeker as her counterpart, her backstory as a girl haunted by the murder of her parents and her quest for revenge, wrapped in that grief, is lampshaded at the start of the show, giving viewers a tangible character to root for from the get-go.
In contrast, the anime takes forever and a day to reveal that plot point. Thanks to this change, Yumeko’s highs and lows feel earned. Every rare stumble, recalibration, and fight from beneath make her victories feel like actual triumphs instead of a narrative inevitability.
Then there's Ryan, the race-swapped version of Ryota, played by Black actor Ayo Solanke. In the manga and anime, Ryota is basically a glorified background character whose only purpose is to react to all the wild shit Yumeko does as an analogue for the audience. Bet gives Ryan his own arc where his one-sided crush on Yumeko, in tandem with his own family issues, gives him a seat at the table as a character with as much agency, if not more so, than the show’s leading lady. Even original show moments where the series feels like it's dipping into eye-rolling territory, like a plot line where the school places bets on Ryan losing his virginity to Yumeko, are played with emotional maturity and care. Where the anime would have Yumeko handwave away the danger her gambling has on her cohorts, like a bullishly written Batman, Bet’s Yumeko doesn’t unwittingly gamble with her friends' lives like an asshole.
Another character I was surprised by was how much I loved Netflix’s adaptation compared to the anime was Bet’s reimagined version of the early villain, Itsuki Sumeragi. In the anime, Itsuki is a one-note sadist who takes joy in collecting her victims’ fingernails as trophies. But the adaptation transforms her into Suki Hennessey, a gender-nonconforming character with a shady influencer past, akin to James Charles. Suki actor Ryan Sutherland might as well have been Denzel Washington, given how he chewed up the scenery in every scene he was in.
Bet’s whole vibe isn’t far off from Netflix’s live-action Death Note—which, yes, features Margaret Qualley for some reason—but Bet scratches the same “if this anime took place in America” itch with more confidence. And, unlike Death Note, which survives almost entirely on the galaxy-brained casting of Willem Dafoe as Ryuk and LaKeith Stanfield as L, Bet doesn’t hedge its bets on a single saving grace. It’s just top-to-bottom unpapologetic cringe, as it was meant to be.
My inciting incident that convinced me and my friend to watch the series was our collective curiosity about how WWE champion Seth Rollins would make a cameo in the series—a cameo that, out of context, reeked to us of shameless brand synergy following Netflix’s own hosting of WWE Raw. Spoiler: Rollins’ already cunty wardrobe and shrill, whiny tone fit right into the show’s madness as another brilliant point of casting.
In comparison to other upcoming live-action anime projects fans are biting their nails to the nub in anxiety over, Kakegurui isn’t a sacred cow in the grander anime community. It’s a weird, horny, and chaotic mess—and Bet understands that. It doesn’t try to sanitize it. Instead, it Westernizes it in ways that feel playful rather than disrespectful. Like One Piece being a similar to Percy Jackson’s whimsical energy or Death Note morphing into Final Destination, Bet knows where not to overstep and where to play loudly within its adaptation.
So if Netflix’s export of live-action anime series going forward is going to lean into CW-style camp, then I welcome it as a chaotic but valuable addition to the anime and manga ecosystem. Adaptations like Bet aren’t slop or guilty pleasures—they’re gateways where normies could join in the fold and check out the anime and manga that inspired them. If Netflix’s One Piece live-action series could become a talking point on The View, pulling normies like Whoopi Goldberg into Luffy’s warm light, then why not let lesser-known titles like Kakegurui get their moment alongside shonen royalty? Bet was wildly fun, and if that fun gets more folks to check out the manga and anime, then let the cringe renaissance continue.
