Forget Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Lawmen,’ Netflix’s New Bass Reeves Series Is Officially Perfect

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

If your favorite part of a Taylor Sheridan series is watching a man insist that everything he does is for his family while making their lives considerably more dangerous, Netflix has something for you. There are familiar pleasures in a Western about protecting your own in a place where the law offers little reassurance. Adding machines and supernatural threats certainly gives that predicament a few new complications.

Bass x Machina takes that family-under-siege premise into a steampunk frontier, with Brian Tyree Henry voicing a father whose efforts to keep his loved ones safe threaten to cost him those very relationships. The appeal for Sheridan fans is easy to see, even if the things waiting outside this particular home would require more than a stern conversation about property boundaries.

The animated Netflix series has launched with a 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on seven reviews at the time of writing. That puts it alongside some of the streamer’s most acclaimed animated originals, including Arcane. It’s an impressive opening, though the small review count means the score could shift as more critics weigh in. The series released on the streamer on November 3, introducing a lawless West populated by brutal outlaws, machinery, and supernatural terrors. Its central father becomes judge, jury, and executioner in the name of protecting his family. Tati Gabrielle and Cree Summer join Henry in the voice cast.

Four icons and four completely different ways of walking into trouble.
This is the one you would have been out there, why it fits, and what it would have cost you.

You have never explained yourself and you have never needed to,
because people work out fairly quickly that you are the most capable person in the room
without you ever having to mention it.

• Eastwood built the character out of everything he refused to do, stripping away the
  backstory, the speeches and every bit of reassurance until only the competence was left.
• You keep your own counsel, and while other people occasionally find that unnerving, you
  have never felt any real need to fix it for them.
• The Dollars films work because he genuinely is in it for himself right up until the
  moment he is not, and he never explains that part either.
• You would be gone before anybody got a chance to thank you.

You are the funniest person in most rooms and the most loyal
person in all of them, and you would be genuinely insulted if somebody suggested those two
things were in any tension.

• Doc has no real reason to be in this fight beyond the fact that his friend is in it,
  which is the only reason he has ever needed for anything.
• You lead with wit, and it does a very effective job of hiding how seriously you take the
  handful of people you actually care about.
• Val Kilmer’s performance is the most quoted in the entire genre because the jokes keep
  getting sharper as the situation gets worse.
• You would spend everything you had on this and still describe it as a good week.

You never wanted this job, and you took it anyway because the
alternative was standing there watching somebody less careful do it badly, which is the most
Western reason there has ever been.

• Earp is the reluctant authority figure, a man who came to town specifically to be left
  alone and somehow ended up answerable for all of it.
• You are protective by instinct, so when something goes wrong your first thought is who
  is exposed rather than who is to blame.
• These films understand that keeping order costs far more than breaking it, and that the
  person holding the line almost never gets thanked.
• You would do the whole thing again, and you would complain about it the entire time.

Nobody has ever successfully talked you out of something you had
already decided was right, and a long line of grown adults has found that out the hard way.

• Mattie is the most relentless character in the Western canon and she manages it through
  argument, paperwork and flat refusal rather than a fast draw.
• You have no patience for being managed, so you negotiate, you check the details and you
  turn up exactly when you said you would.
• True Grit is the rare Western where the moral centre is the youngest person on screen
  and every adult around her has to catch up.
• You would get what you came for, and the film is honest about what that takes out of
  you.

How Does ‘Bass x Machina’ Compare With Netflix’s Animated Hits?

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via Netflix

Netflix has built a formidable collection of animated action and fantasy shows, from the vampire warfare of Castlevania to the revenge quest of Blue Eye Samurai. Bass x Machina enters that company with a perfect score, tying Arcane in the selected comparison below.

Selected series ranked by average Tomatometer score as of November 3, 2026. Scores may change; Bass x Machina’s score is based on seven reviews.

The distinction between a series average and an individual season matters here. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners‘ first season holds 100%, while its current series page lists an 87% average. Castlevania also has two individual seasons at 100%, despite its overall 94% score. Those numbers describe different combinations of reviews, rather than a straightforward verdict that one show is better than another.

Bass x Machina is now streaming on Netflix.

Bass X Machina