Cowboy Bebop (Japanese: カウボーイビバップ, Hepburn: Kaubōi Bibappu) is a Japanese neo-noir space Western anime television series that aired on TV Tokyo and Wowow from 1998 to 1999. Created and animated by Sunrise, it was led by a production team of director Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane, and composer Yoko Kanno, who are collectively billed as Hajime Yatate. The series, which ran for twenty-six episodes (dubbed "sessions"), is set in the year 2071 and follows the lives of a traveling bounty-hunting crew aboard a spaceship, the Bebop. Although it incorporates a wide variety of genres, the series draws most heavily from science fiction, Western, and noir films. It explores themes such as existential boredom, loneliness, and the inability to escape one's past.

Cowboy Bebop was a critical and commercial success both in Japanese and international markets, most notably in the United States, and has been widely hailed as one of the best animated series of all time. It garnered several major anime and science fiction awards and received acclaim from critics and audiences for its style, characters, story, voice acting, animation, and soundtrack. The English dub was particularly lauded and is regarded as one of the best anime English dubs. Credited with helping to introduce anime to a new wave of Western viewers in the early 2000s, Cowboy Bebop has also been called a gateway series.

In the year 2071, roughly fifty years after an accident with a hyperspace gateway that made Earth almost uninhabitable, humanity has colonized most of the rocky planets and moons of the Solar System. Amid a rising crime rate, the Inter Solar System Police (ISSP) set up a legalized contract system, in which registered bounty hunters (also referred to as "Cowboys") pursue criminals and bring them in alive in return for a reward. The series' protagonists are bounty hunters working from the spaceship Bebop. The initial crew consists of Spike Spiegel, an exiled former hitman of the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate, and Jet Black, a former ISSP officer. They are later joined by Faye Valentine, an amnesiac con artist; Edward Wong, an eccentric child, skilled in hacking; and Ein, a genetically engineered Pembroke Welsh Corgi with human-like intelligence. Throughout the series, the team gets involved in disastrous mishaps, leaving them without money, while often confronting familiar faces and events from their pasts: These include Jet's reasons for leaving the ISSP and Faye's past as a young woman from Earth injured in an accident and cryogenically frozen to save her life.

While much of the show is episodic, the main story arc focuses on Spike and his deadly rivalry with Vicious, an ambitious and ruthless criminal of the Red Dragon Syndicate. Spike and Vicious were once partners and friends. However, when Spike began an affair with Vicious's girlfriend, Julia, and resolved to leave the syndicate with her, Vicious attempted to eliminate Spike by blackmailing Julia into killing him. Julia hides to protect herself and Spike, while Spike fakes his death to escape the syndicate. In the present, Julia comes out of hiding and reunites with Spike, intending to make their planned future a reality. Vicious, having staged a coup d'état and taken over the syndicate, sends hitmen after the pair. Julia is killed, leaving Spike alone. Spike leaves the Bebop after finally apologizing to Faye and Jet. Upon infiltrating the syndicate, he finds Vicious on the top floor of the building and confronts him after dispatching the remaining Red Dragon members. The final battle ends with Spike killing Vicious, only to be seriously wounded himself in the ensuing confrontation. Looking up to the sky, Spike sees a vision of Julia. The series concludes as Spike descends the main staircase of the building into the rising sun before eventually falling to the ground in front of the remaining syndicate members, presumably dead.

Shinichirō Watanabe created a special tagline for the series to promote it during its original presentation, calling it "a new genre unto itself". The line was inserted before and after commercial breaks during its Japanese and US broadcasts. Later, Watanabe called the phrase an "exaggeration". The show is a hybrid of multiple genres, most notably Westerns, noirs, and pulp fiction. One reviewer described it as "space opera meets noir, meets comedy, meets cyberpunk". It has also been called a "genre-busting space Western".

The musical style was emphasized in many of the episode titles. Multiple philosophical themes are explored throughout the series using the characters, including existentialism, existential boredom, loneliness, and the effects of the past. Other concepts referenced include environmentalism and capitalism. The series also makes specific references to or pastiches multiple films, including the works of John Woo and Bruce Lee, Midnight Run, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Alien. Additionally, the series incorporates extensive references and elements from science fiction, bearing strong similarities to the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson. Several planets and space stations in the series are made in Earth's image. The streets of celestial objects such as Ganymede resemble a modern port city, while Mars features shopping malls, theme parks, casinos and cities. This setting has been described as "one part Chinese diaspora and two parts wild west".

The characters were created by Watanabe and designed by Toshihiro Kawamoto. Watanabe envisioned each character as an extension of his own personality, or as an opposite person to himself. Each character, from the main cast to supporting characters, was designed to be an outlaw unable to fit into society. Kawamoto designed the characters so they could be easily distinguished from one another. All the main cast are characterized by a deep sense of loneliness or resignation to their fate and past. From the perspective of Brian Camp and Julie Davis, the main characters resemble the main ones of the manga and anime series Lupin III, if only superficially, given their more troubled pasts and more complex personalities.

The series's primary focus is on the main protagonist Spike Spiegel (voiced by Koichi Yamadera), a "space cowboy" with fluffy black hair, often seen wearing a blue suit. The overall theme of the series is often interpreted as being Spike's past and the karmic effect it has on him. Spike is portrayed as someone who, having been separated from the woman he loves, has lost his expectations for the future and finds himself in a near-constant state of lethargy. Watanabe specified that Spike should have an artificial eye, as he wanted the crew of the Bebop to have flaws which would be explored in the show's plot. Originally, Spike was set to be portrayed wearing an eyepatch, but this decision was vetoed by producers.