Altered Carbon

It is the distant future and humanity has transformed.  Everyone is given a 'stack' at the age of 1.  The stack fits into the spinal column at the base of the neck and serves as a backup for the person.  If you die, just put the stack in a new body and you're up and running again.  This changed the view of the body to where it is called a 'sleeve.'  If your original sleeve is killed, time to re-sleeve but your new sleeve could be very different from your old sleeve.  If you can't afford a new sleeve, you might be spun up into a virtual reality to while away your time.  Or your stack might be left on a shelf for a century or two.  Of course, if your stack is destroyed, you're dead.  Thanks to this new technology, society has divided into two castes, the haves and the have-nots.  The wealthy, who are called meths (short for Methuselah) - can afford to have clones of their original sleeve and regularly backed-up their stacks so they are virtually immortal.  They live in palaces in the sky and view themselves akin to gods.

The central character is Takehashi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee), a man with a very complicated past.  The son of a Japanese mother and a Hungarian father, he became a member of an elite military force.  However, he went rogue and joined the rebels before he was finally killed.  His stack has been resleeved (Joel Kinnaman) and he learns it has been 250 years since he was killed.  He has been brought back by Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) to solve a murder.

"Whose murder?" Kovacs asked.

"Mine," Bancroft explained.

Bancroft was found with his stack blown in his office.  Being a meth, his backup was loaded onto a new stack and inserted into one of his many clones available.  However, the destruction of the stack meant that his last memory was almost 48 hours before his death.  What did he do in that time that resulted in his murder or possibly suicide?

Kovacs takes a room at an AI Hotel called the Raven.  Poe (Chris Conner) is the proprietor, basically a projection of the hotel.  He becomes an ally to Kovacs though he is incapable of leaving the hotel because he is the hotel.  The setup reminded me of the holographic doctor (Robert Picardo) on Star Trek: Voyager.

Though the story is very engaging and the setting has a Blade Runner vibe about it, the series is dreary.  It has the feel of a soap opera.  Every scene has an undercurrent of doom.  It's one long tragedy that is interspersed with little tragedies and sprinkled with unhappy people.  The funniest bit in the whole series was when Det. Ortega put her grandmother's stack in a hulking, tattooed, bearded skinhead with a nose ring.  Impressive acting from Matt Biedel!  How else would he get to play a kindly Mexican abuela?

Meh.