During its animation-focused “Drop 01″ livestream event, Netflix unveiled a first look at Blue Eye Samurai, a brand new series from Michael Green (A Haunting in Venice), his co-writer/wife Amber Noizumi, and supervising director Jane Wu (Interview With a Vampire).
Set in 1633 Japan during the Edo period, the series stars Maya Erskine as Mizu, a hardened fighter whose biracial status is made clear by the blue eyes she inherited from her white father. Looking to put a blade through his stomach for assaulting her mother, Mizu carves a very bloody path through the land in her quest for revenge, all the while trying to conceal her identity. Along the way, she crosses paths with a number of characters, including a noodle chef named Ringo (Masi Oka) who decides to tag along with her and the blacksmith who taught her how to fight (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa).
Blue Eye Samurai received a full unveiling from Vanity Fair just yesterday, where it was described as “unapologetically adults-only…ranging in tone from tragic to poetic to barbaric and occasionally erotic.” Beyond all the bloodshed, the show is said to feature corrupt rulers and aristocrats and sleazy human traffickers, things often seen by someone in the midst of a revenge spree. And like other revenge stories, the series will show Mizu learning to connect with others again, which Green called “a very hard lesson for her to learn.” While the first half of the season will show her having acts of mercy and compassion blowing up in her face, the second half will display “that maybe being vulnerable is okay and pays its own dividends.”
The eight-episode season of Blue Eye Samurai will hit Netflix November 3. The series also stars Brenda Song, Stephanie Hsu, George Takei, and Kenneth Branagh.
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