This is a Netflix show you shouldn’t binge on your phone: it demands a bigger screen so you can appreciate the neon-lit Blade Runner-esque noirish excess of the city that’s been created. While specific figures haven’t been released, Kinnaman has referred to it as “a world that’s got a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones” and from the outset it’s on flashy display. He’s given an unlikely option: he can spend the rest of his life behind bars or help solve the “murder” of Earth’s wealthiest man.Įven those who don’t connect with the first episode of Altered Carbon will find it hard to fault the sheer ambitious scale of it all. Takeshi Kovacs is a violent mercenary who wakes up 300 years after his sleeve is killed to find the world a very different place and himself in a very different body, that of the House of Cards and The Killing actor Joel Kinnaman. It’s a development that turns bodies into mere “sleeves” and so a traditional death just means movement from one bag of flesh to the next. It’s an adaptation of Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon, set in a future where our minds are stored on “stacks”, discs that live in the back of our necks. This makes Netflix’s latest offering an intriguing gamble. The success of more grounded shows like Black Mirror and The Man in the High Castle offers further proof of what a wider audience actually wants to see. Unless it benefits from tried and tested franchise recognition (hello Star Wars), ambitious, universe-building science fiction is unlikely to break out beyond hardcore fans. Its failure, taken along with dismal box office results for Valerian and Blade Runner 2049 last year, also indicates a larger genre problem.
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