Cowboy Bebop is a show about the paradoxical human desire to venerate the past while the world can only move forward. A cycle that traps Bebop's crew in an emotional limbo. The show being mostly pointless episodic diversions is the pretty much the entire goddamn point.
To the crew, each new adventure is like a drug; a fleeting high that distracts them from the lives they'd have to rebuild. The future is terrifying, but the future is all that's real. If you live you life with one eye on the past, well, we all know what happens to Spike...
There's good reason Bebop resonated so much with audiences, and continues to endure in anime fandom after all these years. Now, I'm not saying you -can't- find an American screenwriter who gets it, or you can't translate those kinds of emotions into live-action, but...
I think the odds of some TV exec seeing Spike gunkata a jacked-up space-thug while jazzy music plays and assuming -that- is the entire essence of the show is extremely high.
Even nowadays, the idea that anime can offer anything beyond the novelty of ultraviolent cartoons still largely dominates in the west. That's why we get million-dollar sci-fi blockbuster adaptations of *sigh* Cowboy Bebop instead of just like, live action GTO or whatever
