Who Killed Pokémon Concierge?

Last month saw the release of Pokémon Concierge, which may well be the strangest title in the Pokémon franchise. Although strange is, in this case, a relative term. Pokémon started out as a harmless little 1990s video game where you take these cute little monsters and make them fight each other. But in the 30 years since, Pokémon has become a massive international brand. Nearly any random toy, or backpack, or charger, or phone app can carry that branding. As mascots, Pokémon have intrinsic appeal even to a person who’s never played the games, or wants to.

Pokémon Concierge on Netflix is a project that unambiguously understands that the appeal of the little critters has nothing to with the high-stakes stories. People just like to look at them. Which is why they animated Pokémon Concierge in an adorable stop-motion style and our heroine, Haru, only wants to help the little monsters have a good time resting and relaxing at their island resort. Pokémon Concierge is anti-conflict in a way that simultaneously feels old-fashioned in the way the old Frog and Toad cartoons did, designed for little kids in the sense that it’s way less violent than any other Pokémon media property, yet also aimed squarely at nostalgic millennials who have long since given up their dreams of being a Pokémon Master and catching them all and who’d rather just comfort Psyduck, who’s just the sweetest little puppet you’ve ever seen.

So what makes any of this strange? Well, just the fact that this kind of theming is entirely at odds with the rest of the Pokémon branding. Which the Pokémon Company itself seems to have realized, having made no apparent effort whatsoever to advertise Pokémon Concierge through its social media channels. The story gets weirder. Despite Pokémon Concierge sounding like a premise with functionally infinite writing possibilities, Netflix only has four episodes of maybe 15 minutes apiece. Yes, you read that correctly. The last movie you watched is probably twice as long as Pokémon Concierge, the Complete Series. Parents the world over wept, since if Pokémon Concierge weren’t so short, it would be a nearly perfect babysitting show that little kids could enjoy and adults could tolerate in the background without slowly going insane.

Nor has Pokémon Concierge been enough of a success to make further episodes more likely. With only six million hours viewed in its first two weeks as per official Netflix figures, Pokémon Concierge is a surprisingly below-the-radar kind of show given its branding. But given how perfunctorily Netflix advertised it, you can just about expect these results. Pokémon Concierge is a weird project in that it feels like some executive somewhere approved funding and then just forgot about it entirely. Then, by the time someone finally noticed that Pokémon Concierge still existed and tried to pull the plug, it turned out that they’d finished enough of the show so that the stream had to air these four episodes, at least, for contractual reasons.

A lot of Pokémon Concierge’s genesis can probably be traced to Detective Pikachu, an adaptation of a fairly obscure video game that on one end had the same terrible half-baked hero’s journey nonsense every story has now. But on the other end, Detective Pikachu featured a world where people just hung out with Pokémon and enjoyed themselves. Pokémon Concierge is the natural development of that second plank.

But in this cultural landscape besotted with big, melodramatic action stories, what room is there for a story about a failed office worker who tries to do something she loves, and the neurotic little psychic duck she befriends? What do we do with a fish so lacking in self-confidence it needs a safety tube to swim? Can a Pikachu just be shy and nervous, instead of loud, exuberant, and occasionally voiced by Ryan Reynolds?

It’s impossible to know who decided to kill Pokémon Concierge. The puppetry that the show uses might be time-consuming, but was unlikely to be all that expensive, particularly compared to Netflix’s general notoriety regarding bad budgeting decisions. Bad timing in relation the other successes was likely what really doomed Pokémon Concierge. The success of the Super Mario Bros. Movie, and the announcement of a live-action Legend of Zelda movie suggests that Nintendo is adopting a go big or go home philosophy in regard to licensing its brand.

Unfortunately, these kinds of quiet, emotional stories aren’t in vogue right now. A low-effort marketing campaign smothered whatever chance Pokémon Concierge had to be a breakout success. People will no doubt use this as further justification to only adapt Pokémon as ambitiously as possible, since the people clearly don’t want small, wistful stories set in a cute world that’s fun to look at rather than destroy. I do want those stories, though. I should probably be happy we even got these four.