Get Jiro! Hands Anthony Bourdain’s Sushi Avenger to Brian Tee. Critics Say the Quiet Is the Point

Adult Swim’s animated version of Anthony Bourdain’s graphic novel premiered at midnight on Toonami, with screen actors in the lead voice roles. The early reviews keep coming back to the same thing: how little Brian Tee raises his voice.

Get Jiro! debuted on Adult Swim’s Toonami block at midnight Eastern and Pacific, in the first minutes of Sunday, October 4, and it streams on HBO Max from today. The first season runs ten episodes, it’s rated TV-MA, and it’s set in a near-future Los Angeles where chefs run the city like crime families and what you eat tells everyone which class you belong to. Jiro, a sushi chef who wants no part of either side, ends up at war with both.

The source is the 2012 graphic novel Bourdain wrote with Joel Rose for DC’s Vertigo imprint, drawn by Langdon Foss, which was followed in 2015 by the prequel Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi. Warner Bros. Animation and DC Studios made the series. Alessandro Tanaka and Brian Gatewood developed it and run it.

A lead cast you know from live action

Tee, best known for Chicago Med, voices Jiro. Titus Welliver, the long-time star of Bosch, plays Bob, the carnivorous villain. Alison Pill, from Star Trek: Discovery and The Newsroom, plays Bob’s rival Rose. Justin Kirk and Garret Dillahunt are in the cast too.

Image: Adult Swim, Warner Bros. Animation and DC Studios

Adult Swim president Michael Ouweleen says the network didn’t need persuading. “We at Adult Swim were huge fans of Bourdain and Rose’s graphic novels, so when our partners at WBA first mentioned it, we were all in,” reads the statement, as carried by Otakukart.

The casting goes deeper than the famous names. Ridge Harripersad, reviewing the season for CGMagazine, noticed who’s behind the smaller roles. “I also appreciated that nearly every Japanese character was voiced by a Japanese voice actor,” Harripersad wrote, naming Eugene Nomura, Yoshi Amao and Yuwi Kim among them. One episode goes back to Jiro’s past in Tokyo and, according to the same review, it plays entirely in Japanese with English subtitles.

What the critics heard

Four early reviews, written before the premiere, land in the same place. Tee plays it small, and that’s why it works.

Brittany Frederick, writing at tvbrittanyf.com, called Tee “an inspired choice as Jiro” and named the challenge: “the character is a man of few words, so Tee has to make every one of them count, and he gives Jiro the gravity the character deserves.”

Riot-US went further. Tee, the reviewer wrote, “brings a restraint to the role that a lot of animated leads don’t bother with,” and “underplays instead of announcing every emotion, which works in the show’s favor once the story slows down and asks you to read Jiro rather than just watch him.”

Justin D. Williams at Imaginative Visions heard it the same way. Tee “never sounds like he is trying too hard to make the character intimidating, which actually makes Jiro more effective,” Williams wrote. On the whole ensemble: “Nobody sounds like they are simply reading dialogue for an animated action series. There is real personality in the performances.”

Image: Adult Swim, Warner Bros. Animation and DC Studios

Harripersad, who gave the season 8.5 out of 10 at CGMagazine, put it in comedy terms: “Tee was made for this voice-acting role, playing the straight man in comedy while surrounded by utterly ridiculous situations.” Welliver took the reviewer by surprise. “I never thought Welliver from Bosch would do voice acting, but it worked perfectly for the macho, gruff voice of Bob.”

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Frederick saw that one differently, writing that there’s “no better actor to play the carnivorous villain Bob” than Welliver, “who’s been doing fantastic voice work for years.” Pill, in Frederick’s view, “seems to be having a lot of fun with her character’s sass,” and Kirk “likewise has a certain flair.”

Why playing it quiet is the hard part

For anyone who works behind a microphone, the praise is worth a second look. Animation pulls performers toward big. There’s no face on screen doing half the work, the character is drawn, and directors often ask for more energy, more edge, more everything. A lead who stays low and lets the pauses carry the scene is taking a risk. Get it wrong and the character goes flat.

What the reviews describe is a performance built on what Tee leaves out. Jiro barely talks, so every line has to carry weight without leaning on volume. It’s the same skill a narrator uses on a thriller, or a commercial actor on a quiet, conversational read: trust the words and keep the energy under the surface.

It also lands in a familiar argument. Big animated leads go to screen names more often than voice actors would like, and Voice Over Herald looked at how that played out at this year’s Emmys. Get Jiro! doesn’t settle that argument. What it does show, if the reviews hold up, is that the job still comes down to booth craft, whoever’s name is on the poster.

Bourdain’s food, still checked line by line

Bourdain died in 2018, so the team brought in someone who knew him well. “We really needed to make sure, obviously, that we got the food right,” Tanaka told Deadline, in remarks reported by Bleeding Cool. “We got this guy named Matt Goulding, who was a coworker and a very good friend of Bourdain’s. He would read every script, look at every animatic, and watch every episode.”

The premise starts from a simple idea. In Jiro’s world, Tanaka explained, every need is met digitally except eating and tasting food, so “chefs have become the most powerful people in Los Angeles. They’re like gangsters as they take each other out.”

Image: Adult Swim, Warner Bros. Animation and DC Studios

Riot-US felt the writing had Bourdain’s edge. “Extreme veganism, fad diets, celebrity chef worship, it all gets pulled apart here, and you can feel Anthony Bourdain’s fingerprints on that part of the writing,” the review said. And Harripersad liked what came out of the kitchen: “The food looked very Studio Ghibli delicious.”

Get Jiro! continues on Adult Swim’s Toonami, with each episode on HBO Max the day after it airs. If you’ve got a voice actor’s ear, listen for the lines Jiro doesn’t say.

Sources: CGMagazine review (Ridge Harripersad, Oct. 2, 2026); Brittany Frederick at tvbrittanyf.com (Sept. 29, 2026); Riot-US (Sept. 28, 2026); Imaginative Visions (Justin D. Williams); Bleeding Cool, reporting Alessandro Tanaka’s interview with Deadline (June 2026); Otakukart (premiere details, Michael Ouweleen statement); Screen Rant (Rotten Tomatoes score, Oct. 2, 2026); Pixel Twelve (episode count, rating). Images: Adult Swim, Warner Bros. Animation and DC Studios.

Lee este artículo en español: Get Jiro! le da el vengador del sushi de Anthony Bourdain a Brian Tee. La crítica dice que el silencio es la clave

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