I think the German names made it even tougher to keep track of all the characters. Soundtrack was quite good and I was v interested in finding out what was going to happen next throughout. Would recommend

FYI this week's movie - Rock Star - is on cable, Cinemax or something, tomorrow.

Finished second season of Travelers. Recommend

Altered Carbon - A show I wanted to tune out of but found addicting.

Cons- why does 250 years in the future have to be so abysmal? Oddly no poor person has heard of paint to touch up their bleak apartments, poor people walk around wearing black and grey attire and spend their time chanting about politics and walking around on roads that look to be covered in sewer. Further, they live like slobs as if in the future, poorer people won't wish to tidy up. And the rich aren't much better with color coordination for attire, mostly wearing white.

Pros - 1) Wonderful acting especially from the lead from "The Killing," Joel Kinnaman. If you like him, you'll almost have to like this show.
2) Incredibly clever writing that captures your attention and becomes addicting. When I began watching I thought I was watching Dick but the writer of the novel is Richard Morgan, someone I haven't heard of but would like to read more of.

Yukon,

I am def lol’ing at your only con being that the poor people in a dystopian world - where the super rich live way above ground, own everything, and there’s clear massive income inequality - don’t dress nice enough and have chipped paint in their apartments.

I agree the show was a decent binge.

Altered carbon version of the future is just a caricature of the present. Still decent show, though.

Aren't they all

A lesser noticed aspect of Gene Roddenberry's utopian post-scarcity Star Trek vision was that nobody was a slob in the future.

The real complaint I'd have about the dress is that while some of the people do dress wacky like 90% of the characters with lines are wearing clothes that wouldn't draw much attention today. The show is set in what, like 2400? The only thing that seems to change in men's fashion is that some dress shirts have motorcycle jacket collars, Kinnaman's primary outfit wouldn't draw a second glance if you saw him today, and the actress playing the female detective may have been tasked with providing her own costume so she just wore her regular clothes.
Trendy dudes 350 years ago:

Today:

350 years in the future:

I see Altered Carbon is not super popular ITT. I must say that I found it to be fantastic. The start is a bit of a stutter, but they flesh out all that stuff later. Add in breathtaking visuals (AAA movie production quality) and top notch acting, and it is over the top. Getting stuff like this makes my netflix subscription permanent, like rent and electricity.

Full Disclosure: I did not know what cyberpunk was before researching this series. Wow.

Finishing up Travelers tonight. Next is Altered Carbon. Can't waiiiiit.

Add me to the Altered Carbon fanboy list. Great story line with surprising plot twists that really flow with the story.

Also thought provoking when you start working on the concept of replaceable bodies and immortality.

Actually first heard this concept on Tim Ferriss's podcast where they were discussing computers approaching the capability to store the amount of data in human brain. There's got to be some silicon valley billionaires working on it already.

From what I've seen (4 eps so far), one of the problems is that it doesn't really do this. They could go a lot of different ways in exploring the moral/ethical/societal questions that this world brings up, but they don't really do anything with that (so far at least) beyond a very surface-level view.

Sex and violence tho!

I thought Altered Carbon was . . . OK. The acting and writing were poor to mediocre throughout, but it became a little more fun in the last few episodes. Overall it was watchable, but closer to Syfy channel quality then HBO quality.

Kinnaman was fine, but didn't have a whole lot to work with. Ortega was a terrible actress, Takeshi's sidekick with the traumatized daughter was boring, Kell Falconrider or whatever her name is was the least charismatic rebel leader in history, Bancroft was whatever, and the villain that pops up later in the season (vague for spoiler purposes) challenged Ortega for worst actor on the show.

As noted above, while in theory there could have been interesting philosophical questions dealt with in the show, it never gets beyond "rich people abuse the system." The show is basically just a detective story with a not particularly interesting central mystery that occasionally goes on half-baked side stories in an effort to tie in the stack tech.

Yeah I like the show so far(episode 3), but it oddly underplays a lot of the sci-fi aspects to more directly focus on the murder mystery elements that easily could've been written in the present day.

I assume there's more coming, there's one throwaway line by the stripper about how the rich guy would buy new sleeves for hookers he went too far with that hinted at that, but the show is set in a world of functional immortality and interstellar travel via bodyswapping and it mostly imagines that causes like, some problems with your marriage.

(it's also very weird that a guy being unfrozen after 250 years gets precisely zero fish-out-of-water moments where he's confused by changes in society and technology since he was frozen. How good would someone from 1760 be at using a Microsoft Surface to cross reference Twitter death threats with geotagged locations and Linkedin profiles that indicate military backgrounds?)

The Ritual.

Decent horror flick, would recommend. Gets a lil weird at a certain point but I'm ok with that.

I'm also enjoying AC 5 eps in though if we're posting our gripes about it one of my main pet peeves is even dumber in this universe. It always bothers me that every group of super elite special ops on TV includes at least one 130lb woman but in a world where you can literally swap bodies in like a day there's even less excuse for not having it be a bunch of LeBron James types. You could even tell me that 90% of them are women using super athlete's bodies because women tend to have better mental resilience or whatever and I'd go with it but saying that the group training in the jungle are the best that Mars has to offer tilts me. I realise this is a pretty aspy take and you need a decent amount of grrl power to sell a tv show but it still bothers me.

I thought Altered Carbon was ok, notjing special but i enjoyed watching it. I thought Ortega wasnt that great but she is good looking with an amazing body. I liked Poe, and really didnt like the leader of the uprising group.

Rich people will always screw over poor people, and if the same rich people can live for 250 years and grow in wealth and power it would just get worse.

Not to spoil, but I’m an idiot

not to spoil but heres a spoiler

that's the opposite of "not to spoil"

Finally finished criminal minds. Fantastic show! I've never seen a whole episode but I rarely have to put more than one on while trying to go to sleep.

The ending of alerted carbon was kind of terrible.

Idk, maybe Altered Carbon was overhyped, or you guys and gals are harder to please than myself.

I have been suffering from Westworld withdrawals for months, and every darn good show seems to think I will wait for over a calendar year for 6 measly last wrap up episodes...

My own summary was basically; HBO has Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris, Netflix has...the guy from The Killing. Reed Hastings, you need to do better. Quit spending fortunes on Will Smith movies in the golden age of television.

@boburnham
Tomorrow on Netflix. Chris Rock’s first special in 10 years. I got to direct it. ��