On paper, that struggle works. Unfortunately, Altered Carbon's protagonist is also its biggest problem. Kovacs—at least on screen—is a deeply uninteresting hero, and his story isn't a compelling means to enter this world. Kinnaman does a fine job playing the old warrior, and Wil Yun Lee (in flashbacks as pre-sleeved Kovacs) is stellar, but neither of them can solve the simple problem that Kovacs has almost no stake in the life he's been given. He's detached and bitter, and justifiably so, but his lack of interest in the world leads the show to feeling untethered, distant, and focused on all the wrong things.

Instead of an exploration of the complexities and terrors of Altered Carbon's reality, the show is basically a detective story. This isn't, in and of itself, a bad idea—neo-noir has always been a part of cyberpunk's sci-fi DNA, and the broad idea of an outsider taking a tour through a hostile world has a lot of potential. But the engines of the plot, focusing on Kovacs' place in the world and Bancroft's murder, pull the viewer away from the provocative questions that sleeves and stacks raise. To what lengths are the poor willing to go in order to get the bodies they want for themselves, or the people they love? What about, say, transgender people, who might find the opportunity to switch bodies a profound and essential liberation?

Netflix

Altered Carbon is aware of these questions, but they linger on the sidelines, away from the narrative, while Takeshi gets into another inevitable gunfight with mysterious assassins or spends another sexually ambiguous interlude with Bancroft's femme-fatale wife. The show picks up energy once it manages to shed some of the exposition that slows the first couple of episodes to a crawl, but it never manages to marry its plot with the bigger ideas lurking in the margins of its premise. One can imagine how, in the format of a novel, Altered Carbon could have its plot and eat it, too: following Kovacs through an ultraviolent, high-tech Raymond Chandler novel while letting the setting speak for itself in all its intrigue and mystery. The adaptation, though, chafes at its ten-episode constraints, and can't manage the balance.

Every distributor in television is looking for the next prestige genre hit. And a story like Altered Carbon has immense potential to be that show. Cyberpunk, as a specific subset of science fiction, is particularly well suited to our present cultural mindspace. Its focus on the implications of networked, digitized existence, dominated by technocratic regimes that merge economic and technological stratification, is more than a little relevant to where we've found ourselves in 2018.

But despite sporting the high production values necessary to bring a far-flung future to life, Altered Carbon isn't that prestige show. It's a generally interesting, if sometimes plodding, popcorn show with a few great ideas—it just may not be the cyberpunk you're looking for.

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