Altered Carbon

Riding primarily on atmosphere and a complex premise, this series has potential but doesn't live up to its classic cyberpunk counterparts. Here's the deal: People can live forever in digitized versions of their personalities ("stacks"), which are placed into discarded human bodies ("sleeves"). The only way a person can truly die is if their stack is destroyed. This is a complicated enough idea to carry through the entire show, but it's quickly doubled-down on with variations on the concept, like "double stacking" and "full-spectrum DHF remote storage backup." In other words, no sooner does the show establish the rules for its world than it immediately begins to break them.

That's because Altered Carbon is less interested in the ethical and moral implications of technology, or even how the rules of this world can work on a story level, and is more interested in what the setup allows it to depict. Good cyberpunk (like, Blade Runner, Snowpiercer, or Mr. Robot) depicts how technological advancement can lead to moral and social decay within society. But Altered Carbon seems most interested in exploiting that moral and social decay within its world instead. The show works so hard to push the envelope that it often depicts truly offensive scenes, forfeiting the promise of its genre for the sake of cheap violence and sketchy depictions of sex. It's a shame, because the plot has so much potential: solving the murder of a man who's still alive could have been really fun.