Tokyo Vice Season 2: No Longer As Subversive, But Still Great Crime Drama

This column was originally published as part of our newsletter The Daily Show on February 26, 2024. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

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THE FIRST SEASON of HBO's Tokyo Vice had a lot going for itself — shot on location and with beautiful set designs, it was one of the best looking shows out there; well directed (the opening episode helmed my man Michael Mann himself, who also serves as a producer on the show) and pacey; and a (mostly) good cast, with characters that one slowly warmed up to. Yet, the show somehow flew under most radars.

Perhaps it was that the protagonist, Jake Adelstein (played by Ansel Elgort), was the least interesting part of the show — much like the real-life Adelstein in his 2009 memoir, from which the show has been adapted. Doubts were raised about the veracity of events featured in the book around the time of the show's release, never mind that the book was an uneven experience to start with. And not to mention, Elgort’s portrayal was left wanting.

Despite it all, the season ended on a high note, the positives fairly outweighing the negatives. While the show held on to the central premise of the book, much else was reworked for the adaptation, and the show was all the better for it. Now with the fundamentals in place, creator JT Rogers’ series looks to spread its wings for the second season, moving further away from the source material and introducing new storylines, characters, and conflicts.

The first episode the new season kicks off right where the last one ended, with a beaten up Jake taking the tape of Polina’s (Ella Rumpf) murder to Katagiri (Ken Watanabe); Samantha (Rachel Keller) on the cusp of starting her own club via a loan from Ishida; Sato (Shô Kasamatsu) getting repeatedly stabbed by Gen (Nobushige Suematsu); and a sick Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida) mysteriously flying off to an undisclosed location.

Without giving too much away, it's the second episode where the show skips three or so months ahead, giving the characters and the storyline a soft restart. Jake is chasing non-yakuza stories, Samantha has her own club now, Katagiri is biding his time away from the action, while Sato is back on his feet, and Tozawa nowhere to be found.

An array of new faces join in (or take more of the center stage): Misaki Taniguchi (Ayumi Ito), Tozawa's mistress; Shoko Nagata (Miki Maya), a detective seeking to permanently eradicate organised crime in the city; Naoki Hayama (Yōsuke Kubozuka), a high-ranking yakuza in the Chihara-kai; Kaito (Atomu Mizuishi), Sato's eager younger brother; Erika (Hyunri Lee), a retired former club owner who goes into business with Samantha; among others. All to mixed effect.

While on the one hand, the show keeps its visual and aesthetic appeal intact, it's also good to see the original cast of characters now graduated from their season one introductory/origin story roles and have a more established and independent presence in the larger scheme of things. Especially Samantha and Sato. Only if the new roster of above-mentioned characters were remotely as interesting. Most of them feel like conventional add-ons to a crime drama — a cookie cutter hard-ass detective, a menacingly ruthless gangster, an innocent younger brother.

The series also feels much more scattered, with threads pulling in a few too many directions. While some of it is by design, nonetheless it feels like the show is trying to have it both ways. To stick to an overarching plot — closer to the book and more conducive to a limited series format — while introducing a new-case-every-other-week template of long-running television series.

Perhaps worse of all, for a show that often subverted expectations with its storylines and character development in the first season, it seems to run rampant with stupid choices in the second. With Jake leading the way, it's almost excruciating how dense some of the choices made by the characters are. Poor writing aside, it's not out of the realm of possibility that the additional two episodes (each episode is an hour long) might have allowed for more filler material to be filtered in.

But those extra hours also mean that the show has more time to course-correct and better flesh out some of its weaker new characters. It is undeniable that Tokyo Vice has the potential to be a great crime drama coming off its first outing. Whether it lives up to those expectations or falls into run-of-the-mill patterns, only the coming weeks will tell.

Stream Tokyo Vice Season 2 here.