Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon Coming To Netflix as a TV Series

If you’re a Geektown Radio listener, you may remember last August we interviewed to the novelist Richard Morgan. One of the topics that came up was the long rumoured movie based on his first ‘Takeshi Kovacs’ novel Altered Carbon. Whilst this isn’t a movie, it’s possibly something much much better. A series coming to Netflix based on that very book!

For the uninitiated, Altered Carbon is set in the 25th century, where your consciousness can be stored in the cloud, so your mind can be transferred to a new body. The lead protagonist is called Takeshi Kovacs, who started on the wrong side of the tracks before being enlisting in the military joining the elite Envoy Corps. However, after leaving the military, he returns to his earlier criminal ways as a merc, which results in his incarceration. Unlike prison today though, rather than deal with all those annoying bodies you have to feed, the government only stores your mind, which leads to 500 year of imprisonment before being released to take on a murder case, in a world where the technology has made death obsolete. If he can solve the case, he can start a new life on Earth.

The show is being produced and written by Logoeta Kalogridis, the writer behind Shutter Island, Terminator Genisys, and the Bionic Woman tv series (which was a cruel casualty of the writers strike a few years back.) Kalogridis acquired the rights to Altered Carbon 4 years ago, but it’s taken until now to find a home, and thankfully it’s Netflix. It’s one of those books which would benefit from being outside the usual restrictions of the US network system, and Netflix have been batting 10/10 with pretty much everything they’ve commissioned so far.

Kalogridis serves as executive producer/showrunner, with Skydance Productions, who co-produced Star Trek Into Darkness & Star Trek Beyond with Bad Robot, and Mission Impossible Rogue Nation & Ghost Protocol with Paramount. They also produce the brilliant Grace and Frankie for Netflix.

No news on when it’s likely to air it’s 10 episode first season, but Altered Carbon has a strong team behind it, and will definitely be a show to watch out for.