We learned back in January that Netflix picked up the rights with the novel Altered Carbon, which is being produced by Logoeta Kalogridis. Kalogridis is serving as executive producer on it with Skydance TV and they’ve got a ten episode order to bring the 2002 cyberpunk novel to the small screen that Richard Morgan wrote. It turns out that Kalogridis acquired these rights four years ago and has been working on it as a passion project with her company, Mythology entertainment.
Now the first piece of casting has arrived for the show as Joel Kinnaman has boarded the project as the lead character of Takeshi Kovacs. With Kinnaman having a solid action role in the upcoming Suicide Squad and his time with the Robocop reboot, it definitely seems like a role that’s strong for him here.
“Altered Carbon is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there — a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind,” Kalogridis said at the time of the book acquisition.
Novel Concept: In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.
Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . .
