A person’s essence — personality, intelligence, memories — can be loaded onto a metal disc called a stack and, in the event of death or boredom, inserted into a new body. The rich, called Meths (for Methuselahs), can repeatedly clone themselves and live out an unchanging prime of life. The poor make do with any body they can get their hands on, whose age, race and even gender may be different from theirs.

This scenario is the backdrop for a mystery in which, given the new realities, the murder victim is still alive and curious about who killed him. Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), a powerful Meth, creates his own private eye by reviving the stack of a long dead Japanese-Slavic super-soldier, Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee), and putting it in the cybernetically enhanced, cryogenically preserved body of a recently dead Nordic policeman (Joel Kinnaman).

The show is yet another attempt to combine the beloved genres of noir and science fiction, and it demonstrates again — as “Blade Runner” did, even while inspiring a thousand imitators, including “Altered Carbon” — that they’re not really a natural fit, no matter how much their fan bases might overlap. The cynical romanticism of noir and the cosmic mind games of speculative sci-fi are a tricky and not always successful blend. (The current Starz series “Counterpart” succeeds, in part, by staying relatively close to real 21st-century life.)

“Altered Carbon” tries to meld a dystopian class-warfare story and a hard-boiled detective story by simply piling on both the pseudo-philosophical blather (much of it delivered in voice-over by Renée Elise Goldsberry as a rebel leader and Kovacs’s former lover) and the film-noir clichés. The entire twisted-rich-guy-with-beautiful-young-wife plot is a dangerously familiar setup, but the show is proud of its borrowings; when you have a noir rarity like “I Wake Up Screaming” playing in the background of a scene, you’re trying to make a point (while showing off).

Mr. Kinnaman wears a bad attitude as easily as most actors wear a shirt, but playing a reluctant Philip Marlowe-style gumshoe with the soul of a freedom fighter (the embodiment of the show’s dual nature) doesn’t suit him, and he lacks his usual spark. Dichen Lachman, as his sister and fellow rebel soldier, has a better feel for the material and shines in the frequent and graphically bloody action scenes.