What is Get Jiro based on? The author died before he could see a single frame

Get Jiro premiered on Adult Swim on October 3, with episodes streaming on HBO Max the next day. It runs ten episodes, with Brian Tee voicing Jiro and Titus Welliver, Alison Pill and Justin Kirk in the cast. Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka run the show for Warner Bros. Animation, and Rick Morales directs.

The book

It's based on Get Jiro!, a graphic novel Anthony Bourdain wrote with the novelist Joel Rose, drawn by Langdon Foss and published by DC's Vertigo imprint in 2012.

The setting is a near-future Los Angeles where food is the only thing that still matters. Two chefs rule the city: Bob, a classical French cook, and Rose, a vegan devoted to local ingredients, and their factions fight a bloody war over it. Jiro is a stoic sushi chef running a counter in a strip mall in the city's Outer Ring. The book opens with him beheading a customer for bad sushi etiquette.

Bourdain and Rose followed it with a prequel, Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi, in 2015. They never went back to the world after that.

What Bourdain saw

No finished animation, but he saw the project take shape. The adaptation was in early development while Bourdain was still alive, and he had opinions. Peter Girardi, executive vice president at Warner Bros. Animation, described them to Variety when the team showed the series at the Annecy animation festival.

Bourdain insisted that "the way the food is prepared had to be right," Girardi said.

Bourdain died in June 2018. "At that point, Tony was no longer alive, so we went to Joel," Girardi said. Adult Swim didn't order the series until June 2024. Working back from those dates, the earliest conversations about the show happened at least six years before it was greenlit.

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What made it to the screen

The team kept Bourdain's rule and changed a good deal else:

• The look is grounded, with realistic proportions instead of the book's style. Morales wanted a Jiro "more grizzled and world-wearier" than the one on the page.
• Los Angeles is now three rings: expensive restaurants in the center, chains in the middle and a wasteland on the outside, where Jiro lives.
• The culinary consultant is Matt Goulding, who worked with Bourdain on his shows. The cooking is meant to be accurate enough to follow as a recipe.
• Eric Ripert, David Chang and José Andrés, chefs who were friends of Bourdain's, appear in the series.

Girardi has one more story from the early days, about Rose, the vegan villain, and the hat the book gives her. "Why did you give Rose that crazy hat?" he asked Bourdain. The answer: "I don't like vegans."

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