ALTERED CARBON anime in development

In somewhat surprising news, Netflix has confirmed that it is expanding its Altered Carbon commitment with a spin-off anime show.

To be written by Cowboy Bebop writer Dai Sato, the anime will take place in the same universe as the live-action TV series (the second season of which is currently in production), based on Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series of novels, and will expand on the universe and mythology of the setting.

A Pacific Rim anime is also in development at Netflix.

The news is part of a wider engagement by Netflix with Asian television, producing both original live-action series and anime for the network. Netflix is reaching saturation point in the American market and in order to continue growing, it will need to pick up more subscribers in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

Altered Carbon's second season is expected to air before the end of 2019. The air date for the animated series is unknown.

ALTERED CARBON renewed for a second season

After an unusual delay, Netflix have renewed their epic cyberpunk series Altered Carbon, based on the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan, for a second season. Avengers actor Anthony Mackie (who plays Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) will play the lead role of Takeshi Kovacs, taking over from Joel Kinnaman.

The first season aired in February 2018 to mixed reviews (mostly from critics who'd only seen the first four episodes and fans baffled by apparently pointless and arbitrary plot changes) and apparently disappointing viewing figures, with the show garnering apparently only one-third the viewing figures of the considerably cheaper Lost in Space, released a few weeks later. It's possible that the show has picked up additional streamings after the initial release which have made a second season more attractive, which coupled with the casting of Mackie (with attending strong crossover marketing appeal to MCU fans) made the second season viable. Reviews also improved significantly once the entire series was available to view.

In an additional behind-the-scenes change, Alison Schapker (Alias, Fringe, The Flash, Scandal) will be working as writer and co-showrunner alongside Laeta Kalorgridis. Kalorgridis is also working on Netflix's Sword Art Online series, which explains the new division of labour.

It is unclear if the second season will be based on the second novel in the Kovacs trilogy, Broken Angels, which sees a re-sleeved Kovacs joining a mercenary army fighting on a colony planet. Early reports suggested that Kalorgridis was planning a five-season show which would mix original stories with adaptations of the three novels. More news as it comes in.

BROOKLYN NINE-NINE saved by NBC, more shows cancelled

NBC have swooped in to save Brooklyn Nine-Nine after it was cancelled by Fox yesterday.

NBC cited the enormous outpouring of affection for the show as a reason for rescuing the show, along with their excellent relationship with the show's creators, Michael Schur and Dan Goor, whom they previously worked on with Parks and Recreation. NBC is also currently producing Schur's newer series The Good Place.

The sixth season order is for 13 episodes, which will allow NBC to assess how well the series is going before ordering further episodes.

Meanwhile, cancellations are coming thick and fast. Last Man on Earth has also been cancelled after four seasons and Wayward Pines after two. The X-Files has also been cancelled, or more accurately to say, Fox have no plans to continue the show's soft renewal after Gillian Anderson indicated she was done with the series. Producer Chris Carter is still planning more X-Files movies, however. The Exorcist has also been cancelled after two seasons and Lucifer after three. The outpouring of anger over the cancellation of the latter has matched Brooklyn Nine-Nine's, with fans hoping for a similar reprieve on another network.

Meanwhile, Batman prequel show/hallucinogenic fever dream Gotham is in the bizarre predicament of having its future decided by what happens to another show, the Lethal Weapon reboot. Fox was forced to fire Lethal Weapon's star after on-set drama and is now scrambling to recast with just days left before a final deadline. If it is unable to do so, it will can Lethal Weapon and renew Gotham, otherwise Gotham will be axed, despite some recent ratings boosts as the show has focused on the Joker as a villain and the teenage Bruce Wayne taking more definitive steps towards donning the cowl.

Also in an unusual state is Agents of SHIELD. ABC tried to kill the show last year, but owners Disney stepped in and overruled them, citing the show's importance to their overall Marvel Cinematic Universe. This still seems to be the case this year, with Disney and Marvel leaning on the season finale to tie in with Avengers: Infinity War and help build intrigue for next year's sequel, as well as Captain Marvel (which will see Agents of SHIELD actor Clark Gregg rejoin the movie cast for the first time since the original Avengers movie). On that basis, it seems unlikely that Disney will kill the show, especially as it could make a great fit for their new streaming service launching in late 2019 (allowing them to take it - and possibly their entire Netflix roster - out of another company's hands). With ABC unhappy about the ratings, however, it might be that we get a compromise, with a half-season order with the show not to return until after Infinity War II hits our screens next spring.

Over at the CW, executives surprised industry observers, their own fans and the creative team by confirming they would not be proceeding with Wayward Sisters, a spin-off from their long-running series Supernatural. After a well-received backdoor pilot earlier this year, the project looked good for a season order and it's a bit of a puzzle why the CW has not proceeded with it.

Meanwhile, the fate of The Expanse remains unclear. Alcon Entertainment own the show outright so can sell it to Amazon, Netflix or another network much more easily, but this is likely to be a more involved process, where we likely won't know the outcome for a few weeks at least.

Over at Netflix directly, the streaming service seems happy with the performance of Lost in Space (despite lukewarm reviews) and on course to renew. The fate of Altered Carbon is much less clear. The cyberpunk epic aired to generally good reviews (after more mixed early previews), but its viewership seemed weak, with the show charting up less than one-third of the streams of Lost in Space in its first week available, despite an apparently higher budget. However, Netflix themselves have to bear some blame for this by sabotaging Altered Carbon's launch with news of their Cloverfield Paradox deal (complete with a major Superbowl ad campaign). With Altered Carbon airing three months ago, it is unusual for Netflix to wait so long before confirming the show's return or cancellation, suggesting it's a tough decision for them.

The most expensive TV shows of all time

Last year there were a couple of attempts to make a list of the most expensive TV series of all time, which failed because they used radically outdated information and didn't take account of some of the newer shows on the block. So let's take a stab at this with slightly better information.

It should be noted that this list applies to ongoing TV shows, not special event mini-series or made-for-TV (or streaming) movies. Including those projects, the 10-episode HBO event series The Pacific is comfortably the most expensive TV show ever made with a budget approaching $270 million, or a mind-boggling $27 million per episode. John Adams, another HBO mini-series, spent $100 million on 7 episodes, meaning it matched the seventh season of Game of Thrones at around $14 million per hour. Band of Brothers, The Pacific's forebear, cost $125 million for 10 episodes, with an additional $15 million in marketing.


14: Lost
$132 million for Season 1

Lost gets onto the lower end of this list by dint of it's Season 1 budgeting set-up. The show was budgeted at around $4 million per episode - already on the high end of things for a 2004 network TV show - but the cost of getting J.J. Abrams on board and setting up a filming facility in Hawaii saw the budget blast upwards to almost $6 million per episode. The pilot alone cost $14 million and saw the production team have to fly in an actual aircraft fuselage for the crash scenes. They then had to remove the wreckage and leave the Hawaiian beach in absolutely pristine condition. This cost a fortune. ABC's financial department was so aghast that the head of the network was fired on the spot. Fortunately, Lost turned out to be the biggest and most popular show ABC had launched in years and it made a healthy profit in foreign sales. In addition, with the set-up work done for the first season, later seasons were able to drop the budget to around $5 million per episode, and this was reduced further when Seasons 4-6 were given shorter orders.

13: Altered Carbon
$7 million per episode (Season 1)

The newest show on this list, Netflix's Altered Carbon features not just elaborate sets (including a full futuristic cyberpunk street that could be shot from multiple angles to depict different parts of the city) and stunning CGI, but also cutting-edge filming techniques involving state-of-the-art 5K cameras and some incredibly elaborate action sequences. Thanks to basing shooting in Canada, the show was able to deliver a formidable amount of production value for an - by Netflix standards - relatively modest budget.


12: Stranger Things
$8 million per episode (Season 2)

For its debut season, Stranger Things was given a $6 million budget by Netflix, perhaps a sign that they were not expecting great things from this drama (contrasted to the much bigger budgets given to Marco Polo and The Get Down). Fortunately, the show was a break-out mega-hit for the network and its second season was given a hefty budget increase (indeed, some reports suggest that, including marketing, it may have been closer to $9 million per episode). With Season 2 hinting that the show might start moving further afield from its small town setting, we may see this jump higher in future seasons.


11. Star Trek: Discovery
$8.5 million per episode (Season 1, after budget overruns)

As the show to launch CBS All Access, relaunch the franchise on screen and lead the charge for CBS's new take on Star Trek (in opposition to Paramount's films), Star Trek: Discovery was given a very generous opening budget of $7 million per episode. After the show had been "Fullerised" (see later on for an explanation), that budget somehow came out at around $1.5 million per episode higher. Still, the show looks it, with fantastic visuals and draw-dropping sets. Fortunately, the show was pre-sold in a special deal to Netflix that put it in profit before a second of footage was shot, so CBS came out way ahead on the deal.

10. Westworld
$9 million per episode (Season 1)

Westworld, HBO's SF epic, is expensive and looks it. The show's budget was, unusually, patterned irregularly, with each episode budgeted according to script need far ahead of time. It's more normal for a studio to assign a per-episode budget and then leave it up to the showrunners how they divide that (resulting in those famous "bottle episodes" of TV series with few or guest cast and shot entirely on the standing sets, usually following very expensive ones; Breaking Bad's The Fly may be the best recent example). This pattern budget moved from $25 million (for the pilot and the cost of constructing the standing sets) to $8 million for the cheapest episode of the season and then up to $10 million for the most expensive, leaving the average somewhere around $9 million.


9. Sense8
$9 million per episode (Season 2)

The first season of Sense8 cost a cool $7 million per episode, making it one of the most expensive shows ever back in those ancient days of, er, 2015. With its elaborate stunts and fight scenes and globe-trotting nature - the show shot in 8 different cities in 7 different countries - the show also looked like it put every penny on screen. Alas, the second season saw significant cost overruns, including the questionable decision to add several shooting days in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at a moment's notice which put over $2 million extra on the budget. With Season 2 underperforming in viewing figures - although some of that is on Netflix, who dubiously chose to keep marketing their drama 13 Reasons Why instead of switching on the marketing for Sense8 Season 2, meaning lots of people missed that it had been released - and the Wachowskis unwilling to compromise on the budget, Netflix canned the show. After a mass outcry, they did agree to fund a 2-hour TV movie to round the series off, which will air later this year.


8. Marco Polo
$9 million per episode (Season 1 & 2)

Netflix poured a lot of money in the visuals and cast for this huge, sprawling costume epic, which they hoped would be their very own Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, a lacklustre script, poor critical reception and lukewarm viewing figures saw it canned after two seasons.


7. Rome
$9.5 million per episode (Season 1)

HBO and the BBC poured a huge amount of money into this show, buoyed by the success of their previous collaboration on Band of Brothers. Alas, the TV market in 2005 was not ready for a show this expensive. Poor viewing figures in the UK - not helped by the decision to cut a full episode from the first season run (with scenes ham-fistedly inserted into other episodes) - saw them pull funding after the second season and HBO panicked and shut down the show. Just a few years later they admitted they'd made a massive mistake, as DVD and Blu-Ray sales had been stratospheric and the show later had a critical reappraisal that saw it elevated to being considered one of HBO's finest accomplishments. With the elaborate sets in Italy still standing (currently being used as a tourist attraction), it's possible we could even see a return for HBO to the Roman Empire: they've been considering a fresh adaptation of I, Claudius for a few years which would effectively be Rome: The Next Generation.


6. Friends
$10 million per episode (Season 10)

One of the biggest factors that kills a show is the cost of keeping your increasingly famous cast on-board. For the final season of Friends, the cast had negotiated a mind-boggling $1 million per episode each, meaning each episode cost $6 million before a frame of footage was shot. This was unsustainable for NBC and they decided to end the show after the tenth season, despite the show's continuing worldwide popularity. A bigger mystery might actually be what on earth the other $4 million per episode was spent on.

5. American Gods
$10 million per episode (Season 2, Season 1 after budget overruns)

To adapt Neil Gaiman's award-winning fantasy novel, Starz gave producer Bryan Fuller a very healthy budget of $7 million per episode. However, this proved insufficient for Fuller's needs and the season eventually emerged $30 million over-budget, to the network's palpable displeasure. What saved American Gods from immediate cancellation was a highly lucrative international distribution deal with Amazon outside the US. What couldn't save Fuller was that, having "Fullerised" the first season, he received an offer to make Season 2 for $9 million per episode, which he took to be a budget cut (rather than a $2 million per episode budget increase, which is very definitely how Starz saw it) and objected to. Unable to reach an accommodation, he left his second show that he'd managed to burden with budget overruns in the same year (Star Trek: Discovery having already been through the same thing). Fortunately, Neil Gaiman and Jesse Alexander have taken the reigns for the second season, promising to rein in costs, so hopefully the story will now be completed as planned.


4. The Get Down
$12 million per episode (Season 1, with reported cost overruns going much higher)

Netflix budgeted for an impressive $133 million for the first season of The Get Down, which was extraordinarily generous. However, it was the cost of working with Baz Luhrmann, the visionary director behind films such as Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby. Luhrmann, it turned out, did not like working under such tight restrictions and went over-budget. A lot. Some reports place the show's final budget for its first season of 11 episodes at somewhere closer to $200 million. With poor streaming figures and a mixed critical reception, Netflix understandably dropped the project like a hot potato.


3. E.R.
$13 million per episode (Season 6)

In comfortably the most expensive network TV deal of all time, NBC shelled out an insane $13 million per episode for the sixth season of E.R. This came about because Warner Brothers produced the show under contract for NBC and this contract ended after Season 5. CBS offered a higher amount of money, forcing NBC into a bidding war which crippled the show's finances. Later seasons saw viewing figures decrease, so NBC was able to negotiated a lower fee, much to the relief of their bean-counters.


2. The Crown
$13 million per episode (Season 2)

Netflix's most successful series of all time is also its most expensive. This lavish period drama about the early years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign has an all-star cast, complete with meticulous set reconstructions of real locations and elaborate (if mostly invisible) effects to sell the period setting.

1. Game of Thrones
$16.6 million per episode (Season 8)

Game of Thrones started off relatively modest, with a budget of $6 million per episode for the first season. HBO could have gone higher but decided to start modestly after the debacle of earlier expensive shows like Rome. The budget grew quickly: $6.9 million per episode for the second season, over $7 million per episode for the third season and so on until it hit the magic $10 million per episode barrier in Season 6. For Seasons 7 and 8 producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss requested fewer episodes so they could spend more time on producing them, but HBO generously allowed them to keep the same production budget, which meant that Season 7 of Thrones (7 episodes) came in at over $14 million per episode and Season 8 (6 episodes) at over $16 million. This isn't including HBO's lavish marketing and advertising for the show as well. Thrones has set new benchmarks in TV production quality but also expense, which is something that TV production companies may eventually come to rue. But for HBO, it's worked splendidly.


There are challengers on the horizon, however. Game of Thrones has a spin-off prequel in the planning stages which will likely be expensive (just not as expensive as the mothership in its last few seasons). Sony Television are working on a Wheel of Time series which can't help but be quite pricey. Netflix's fantasy drama The Witcher will likely have significant production costs, as will Showtime's Kingkiller Chronicle prequel show.

But the two hundred-pound gorillas in the room are Disney and Amazon. Disney have a live-action Star Wars TV series in pre-production under conditions of tremendous secrecy. Given it won't just be the first-ever live-action Star Wars show but will also be launching Disney's new streaming service in late 2019, there's a lot riding on the show and they will spending accordingly (there will also be a new Marvel live-action show to help launch the service). Even more formidable is Amazon's deal with Warner Brothers and the Tolkien Estate to buy the rights to make a Lord of the Rings prequel show. A rumoured $250 million was shelled out just for the rights, with a commitment to spend $150 million per season for five seasons. Including the rights costs, this would comfortably make the new show (expected to air in 2020) the most expensive TV series ever made.

In the midst of all these figures flying around, it may be instructive to remember that you can still get a popular show for a lot less money. The second-biggest TV show in the world (after Game of Thrones) right now is AMC's The Walking Dead, which costs that network an astonishingly low $2.75 million per episode, despite its huge cast and elaborate make-up effects. If you ever wondered why The Walking Dead seems incapable of getting its cast into just one episode and spends five episodes of people walking around looking constipated for every episode of decent character and plot development, now you know.

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Altered Carbon: Season 1

It's a world where human beings have become digital information, swapped between bodies, backed up on the cloud and sometimes illegally copied. It's a world where centuries-old rich folk - the 1% of the 1% of the 1% - have formed a vaguely bored and utterly corrupt elite watching over the rest of the human race. It's a world utterly unprepared to deal with a man named Takeshi Kovacs, an Envoy from Harlan's World, an utterly formidable soldier who swaps bodies as easily as swapping guns. He is called in to solve an impossible murder, and in the process flushes out the demons of his own past. Welcome to Bay City, Earth, 2384.

A few years ago, Hollywood suddenly decided that cyberpunk was going to be the next big thing. Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner 2049 were commissioned as films, Harebrained Schemes resurrected Shadowrun as a video game franchise and (over in Poland) CD Projekt Red began developing the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, whilst Netflix picked up Duncan Jones' Mute as an original movie. Netflix also commissioned Altered Carbon, a 10-episode adaptation of Richard Morgan's 2002 novel of the same name, an early classic of 21st Century science fiction.

The brief cyberpunk bubble has burst with the disappointing under-performance of Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner 2049 (despite the latter's visual and thematic brilliance), which must have led Netflix to feeling nervous about Altered Carbon. A violent, complex story rooted in graphic violence and a fair amount of sex whilst asking questions about humanity, immortality, death, family and morality, it's dense, sprawling hard-edged and sentimental, with a fairly complex plot. Early reviews have also been mixed.

Fortunately, these fears can mostly be laid to read. Altered Carbon is a dramatic, compelling drama with great performances, outstanding visual effects (the astonishing CGI may be the finest ever put on the small screen, even if it comes at the cost of a surprisingly small number of well-used sets) and which has a lot to say about the dangers of immortality, the corrupting influence and power of money and the little people going up against an uncaring system. Little of what Altered Carbon has to say is new, but the renewed relevance of its themes to modern society certainly makes it worthwhile to reassess them.

Our main focus is on Takeshi Kovacs, played for most of the run-time by Joel Kinnaman. Kinnaman has been criticised in the past for being a bit bland, but is surprisingly good in the main role. He is great in the action scenes, nails the painful interrogation sequence from the books and does a good job of portraying the different characters of Kovacs and Ryker (the former owner of Kovacs' new sleeve). Kinnaman's range is not great but he does "brooding, annoyed intensity" very well. He is even exceptional in a sequence that feels like Kovacs just walked out of the books, where he manipulates a woman into giving him vital information by (cynically) engaging her empathy.

We also get lengthy flashbacks to Kovacs' time as an Envoy, where he is played with earnest charisma by Will Yun Lee. These sequences also see significant screen-time for Kovacs' former Envoy allies Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman) and Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), both of whom are outstanding and powerful (especially Goldsberry, who has to be severe, military, charismatic and emotional at the same time, all without damaging the character, and pulls it off). The Envoy/Harlan's World backstory has been significantly changed for the TV series, which some fans are concerned about. The primary motivation for these changes is that in the book Kovacs is a loner who lives in his own head most of the time, rarely making connections with other human beings and only reluctantly being drawn into friendships and alliances with other people. These changes are designed to make Kovacs a more relatable character, giving him more of a family and making him less of a solo operator. This is due to the limitation of the television format: no matter how good the actor, spending eight or ten or thirteen hours with one person would eventually get old.

In the present-day storyline, the TV show gives dramatically expanded roles to Kovacs' sentient hotel sidekick (Chris Conner's Edgar Allan Poe replacing Jimi from the books, thanks to the Hendrix Estate not giving out the image rights), Bay City police detective Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), ex-soldier Vernon Elliott (Ato Essandoh) and, via flashbacks,  This makes the series less claustrophobic than the books but also less intense, and the intensity of the novels is kind of one of the points.

The expanded casting is a success: Martha Higareda gives Ortega a sense of intelligence and a barely-contained fury which explodes on several rather memorable occasions. As effectively a co-lead to Kinnaman in several episodes, Higareda makes Ortega a compelling protagonist and another window on this future world, with her Christian family divided over the morality of re-sleeving and cheating divine judgement. Essandoh has less to do until the last few episodes, when his complicated family situation gains renewed relevance, but gives a solid supporting performance as a damaged human being looking to fix what's gone wrong with his life. Chris Conner is simply outstanding as Poe, and any regrets about not getting Jimi from the books are soon swept away as we do get to see the sentient hotel AI joining forces with Kovacs as a partner (an idea hinted at in the novel but left resolutely unfulfilled), which is filled with both humour and pathos.

James Purefoy is also excellent as Laurens Bancroft, the 300-year-old "Meth" whose murder (and subsequent amnesiac resurrection in a new sleeve) sets the story in motion. Purefoy eats up these kind of morally conflicted-but-charismatic roles for breakfast (see also his outstanding turn as Marc Antony in HBO's Rome) and is on top form in this series. It's also good to see his actor's integrity stands firm (so to speak): in Rome he was annoyed by how the actresses were asked to disrobe on a fairly regular basis but not the male actors, so demanded a scene be written to show his solidarity (again, so to speak) with them. This fine tradition continues unabated in Altered Carbon, and it would be disappointing if he didn't rib Kinnaman about the latter's reluctance to also appear unadorned (complete with some mildly ridiculous strategic towel/camera placement).

The pacing is also pretty good. Netflix shows often struggle with how to structure their stories over 12 or 13 hours (often because their stories don't warrant 13 hours in the first place), but Altered Carbon only has 10 episodes to fill and a fairly dense 500-page SF novel to draw on, so each episode is fairly full to bursting with character moments, worldbuilding, flashbacks and action. Several episodes draw back from the bustle and shine with laserlike focus: episode four with its torture storyline is uncomfortable viewing but it does help get into Kovacs' mindest. The resolution to that story is arguably the novel's "Red Wedding" moment (with an arguably better cathartic outcome) and the TV show nails it. Episode seven is mostly set on Harlan's World and explores Kovacs' backstory in much greater detail and works really well.

Alas, the show is far from flawless. Some of the changes to the Envoys and backstory make sense but others do not, and will make adapting the second and third books more difficult. There's no real tackling of the idea that the stacks may simply be recording a copy of someones personality and memories, not their actual consciousness (the ability to double-sleeve in fact pretty much proves that people still die, with just a copy living on, just there's no real existential exploration of this idea), although as I recall the novel doesn't really delve into that either. The "murder mystery" storyline occasionally gets forgotten about for entire episodes, and some developments in the case feel like they came out of absolutely nowhere. Kristin Lehman's Miriam Bancroft is a decidedly unengaging and uninteresting character. Most annoying is the show's decision to keep deploying "mumbly dialogue syndrome", with the characters (particularly the accented Kinnaman and Higareda) either forgetting to enunciate properly or (more likely, given there's plenty of scenes where they're fine) the sound not being mixed properly. The original music is also pretty forgettable, although there's some good use of songs.

Altered Carbon (****) is a hard-edged and interesting science fiction show with incredible visuals and good performances, suffering a little from some muddy plot developments and under-exploration of the central premise. With a second season already in the planning stages, it'll be interesting to see where Netflix takes Takeshi Kovacs next. The show is available worldwide right now on Netflix.

Full ALTERED CARBON trailer

Netflix have released their full trailer for Altered Carbon, their 10-part adaptation of the 2002 novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan.

Altered Carbon debuts on Netflix on 2 February 2018. Work on a second season (to shoot later this year for late 2019 transmission) is already underway.

Richard Morgan also has a blog post here on his visit to the set last February.

CYBERPUNK 2077 lurches into life again

CD Projekt, the Polish development company behind the Witcher trilogy of video games and the GoG digital games service, seem to have begun the pre-release marketing for their next video game: Cyberpunk 2077.

They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step, and that's what this move seems to be: five years after its last tweet, the Cyberpunk Twitter feed has rebooted itself with a simple "beep".

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012 as one of two large-scale, open-world RPGs the company was working on. The other was, of course, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which was released to a rapturous reception in early 2015 (I am playing this at the moment and should have a review in the next week or so). After an early concept trailer and a bunch of interviews, CD Projekt declared radio silence, not wanting to hype up the game before it was ready.

Cyberpunk 2077 is - shockingly - a cyberpunk video game set in the year 2077. It is set in the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper RPG universe created by Mike Pondsmith in 1988, a world of massive corporations, oppressive corporations and people struggling for freedom and humanity in a world of massive technological and corporate power. The video game will be set in one city (probably Night City, a post-conflict Californian city and the signature setting in the pen-and-paper game) and possibly its surrounds, and will allow players to create their own character. They will be able to pursue a detailed main storyline, numerous side-quests and lots of optional activities. There may also be a multiplayer component of some description.

Given the impact of the Cyberpunk RPG and the genre as a whole, which inspired the Deus Ex and Shadowrun franchises, among others, it'll be interesting to see what the final result is like. CDPR may also be fortuitously tapping into a renewed interest and awareness in the cyberpunk genre, thanks to the recent release of Blade Runner 2049 (out on DVD and Blu-Ray next month) and the arrival of the Netflix TV series Altered Carbon.

It'll be interesting to see how in-depth the marketing for Cyberpunk 2077 will be, and if CDPR are going to give us a short, sharp campaign followed by release or something longer. In either case, the hopes for a 2018 or early 2019 release have risen according.

ALTERED CARBON "amberlit" for Season 2

Netflix seem to be showing a lot of confidence in their new science fiction series Altered Carbon, as they have already ordered preparatory work to begin on a potential second season of the show.

This isn't quite a greenlight for a second season as some venues are reporting - which would need to be formally announced, probably within a few weeks of the show's debut date - but could be called an "amber light", which means that the studio orders scripts, books studio space and invokes holding clauses in actor contracts but these can all be cancelled if they decide not to renew. In the case of Netflix, they tend to give their shows two seasons to prove themselves, so in this case it's less of a gamble. Also, contrary to some reports that have had Altered Carbon cited as Netflix's most expensive show of all time, the series budget is actually around $7 million per episode, the same as Sense8's first season three years ago (so with inflation it's slightly less). Although certainly not cheap, that's well down on Marco Polo's $10 million per episode or The Crown's $12 million.

Season 1 of Altered Carbon arrives on Netflix on 2 February 2018. Meanwhile, you can meet some of the cast via this panel from Brazil's Comic-Con.

Netflix releases official ALTERED CARBON promo pics

As well as the trailer and release date (2 February 2018 people, remember to mark your diaries), Netflix have released a number of official promo pics for Altered Carbon, as follows:

In the future mankind has colonised other planets, including one called Harlan's World. Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee, at least to start with) is an Envoy, a brutal and ultra-skilled soldier. He fights alongside his sister Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman) in a war on the colony.

A key point of worldbuilding in this future is that consciousness has gone digital and is now stored (or backed up) on an implant in the spine called the "cortical stack". This means that if someone's body is killed, their stack can be removed and implanted in a new body, allowing them to live again. If a stack is destroyed, a person can be restored from a "backup", missing the memories of the period after they were backed up. It is existentially questionable if this is the same person, though, or a copy.

Because FTL travel does not exist (the colonies were settled by massive slower-than-light ships with frozen crews), the only fast way to travel between Earth and its colonies in a hurry is "needlecasting", with their personality transmitted through micro-wormholes to receivers on other planets. Early on in the story, Kovacs's services are required on Earth so he is "needlecast" into a new body, that of a man called Elias Ryker (Joel Kinnaman).

Kovacs is hired by Laurens Bancroft (the immortal James Purefoy) to solve a personal murder: his own. Bancroft's body was killed and his stack destroyed. Restored from a backup, he directs Kovacs to find out who killed him and why (a quirk of this situation is if the victim did something to get himself killed after the backup point, his restored self won't have a clue as to what that was).

Bancroft lives in - or, more accurately above - Bay City, a 24th Century version of San Francisco which is divided between the poor living in slums, the ultra-rich living in towers far above the clouds and the middle classes strewn in massive towers inbetween.

Kovacs' former boss is Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), the commander of the Envoys. The Envoys have specialised combat training and have undergone special conditioning to allow them to be frequently resleeved without the psychological disorientation and existential anxiety that affects other people. The Envoys are so dangerous and lethal that they are not allowed to hold government office, with people fearing that they would become an elite class of citizen.

Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) is a detective with a complicated past, who soon teams up with Kovacs to help find an answer to the mystery.

Another factor in this future is religion. Roman Catholics vehemently reject the resleeving technology as a way of subverting divine judgement after death and want the technology banned.

Kovacs stays in a heavily-fortified (with an emphasis on the heavily) hotel run by a sentient artificial intelligence modelled on Edgar Allan Poe (Chris Conner), who takes a shine to the Envoy. This is Jimi Hendrix in the novel, but Netflix couldn't get the rights to use Hendrix's likeness. Vernon Elliot (Ato Essandoh) is a military veteran whose wife has been imprisoned, forcing him to take extreme measures.

The fight scenes are going to be particularly brutal, with Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochik (The Gift, Hardhome, Battle of the Bastards, The Winds of Winter) directing the pilot episode, Out of the Past. The other directors are Netflix regular Uta Briesewitz (Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Orange is the New Black), Peter Hoar (Daredevil, Da Vinci's Demons), Nick Hurran (Doctor Who, Sherlock), Andy Goddard (The Punisher, Luke Cage, Downton Abbey) and Alex Graves (Game of Thrones, Homeland, House of Cards, The West Wing).

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Full trailer for Netflix's ALTERED CARBON released

After a couple of weeks where images, videos and GIFs for their new show Altered Carbon started leaking out, Netflix have finally released the first full and official trailer for the show, along with the logo.

Set in Bay City - a futuristic San Francisco - in the 24th Century, the series revolves around a former Envoy or mercenary named Takeshi Kovacs who is called in to investigate a murder. The murder victim has been reborn - "resleeved" - in a new body - and wants to find out who did it, and why given the pointless nature of the crime where people can be reborn from back up information and cortical stack implants.

The 10-part series is one of the most expensive shows Netflix has ever produced (outstripped only by The Crown, Marco Polo and Sense8). It is based on the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy by Richard Morgan, starting with the novel Altered Carbon (2002).

Altered Carbon will be released on Netflix on 2 February 2018.

Images from ALTERED CARBON posted

A Reddit user has posted three GIFs which seem to be from Netflix's upcoming TV series Altered Carbon, based on the first (of three) Takeshi Kovacs novel by British SF author Richard K. Morgan.

The images were posted by a user called "Last Envoy", possibly a reference to the titular character of Takeshi Kovacs, an "Envoy" who swaps bodies to carry out missions. They were accompanied by a time and location: 2348 A.D. and Bay City. The date backs up the information that the date of the series has been moved up by about a hundred years (the novel is set in the 25th Century), whilst Bay City is the name of the futuristic city in the book.

The "Skin Jobs Dive Bar" sounds like it could be a homage to Blade Runner. The noodle bar shot above also shows a police car and a handcuffed suspect.

Above is a "Smoks n Vapr" kiosk, which is appropriately convincing.

If these pictures are legit - and I don't believe there's any other epic cyberpunk TV shows or movies filming so I can't see what else they are from - then it looks like Netflix have spent their money well on the series.

Altered Carbon is due to air on Netflix in 2018. The producer said a few months ago that they were targeting a February release date, so this could be with us sooner than expected.

ETA: Here's the cover for the reissue of Altered Carbon, featuring - I believe - Leonardo Nam as the "original" Kovacs before he's resleeved. It's an interesting choice as Kovacs spends most of the novel in a Caucasian body (played by Joel Kinnaman) but okay.

ETA2: Richard Morgan has retweeted the story on io9, making it further likely this is legit.

Shooting wraps on Season 1 of ALTERED CARBON

Shooting concluded yesterday on Season 1 of Netflix's TV adaptation of Richard Morgan's classic cyberpunk noir novel, Altered Carbon.

The 10-episode season will air on Netflix in February 2018. It stars Joel Kinnaman as Kovacs, James Purefoy as Laurens Bancroft, Kristin Lehman as Miriam Bancroft, Martha Higareda as Kristin Ortega,  Chris Conner as Poe, Alika Autran as Okulov, Tahmoh Penikett (late of BSG) as Dimitri Kadmin, Matt Frewer as Carnage, and Teach Grant as Jimmy DeSoto among many others.

The project is the second-most-expensive in Netflix's history, coming in only behind the second season of Sense8. It'll be interesting to see if Netflix can make a success of what will be the first major attempt to make literary cyberpunk work as a live action TV show.

ALTERED CARBON TV series will launch in 2018

Netflix has put up a placeholder web page for their new cyberpunk SF show Altered Carbon, based on Richard Morgan's iconic Takeshi Kovacs trilogy of novels. It doesn't contain much info at the moment, but it does confirm that the show will launch in 2018 rather than late this year, as some had previously hoped.

Production on the series started at the end of last year and would appear to be wrapping up sometime around now. Lots of effects work remains ahead - Altered Carbon is reportedly Netflix's most expensive show at $7 million an episode, matching the earlier seasons of Game of Thrones (but only half of the budget of the upcoming seventh season of that series) - before the show hits the screen.

Filming underway on the ALTERED CARBON TV series

Filming is well underway on Netflix's adaptation of Richard Morgan's cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon, the first in his Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.

According to James Purefoy, the cast and crew are currently shooting the third episode of ten (shooting began in November in Vancouver). Purefoy describes the show as huge in scope, one of the biggest projects Netflix has attempted. Actor Joel Kinnaman confirms that the show has a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones (when the budget for that series grew from $6 million to $7 million an episode; Season 7 has a budget of over $14 million per episode, which Altered Carbon is unlikely to match any time soon).

The show will star Joel Kinnaman and Leonardo Nam (Westworld) as body-swapping soldier Takeshi Kovacs, James Purefoy (Rome, The Following) as Laurens Bancroft, Renee Elise Goldsberry (The Good Wife, Hamilton) as Quellcrist Falconer, Kristin Lehman (The Killing) as Miriam Bancroft, Martha Higareda as Kristin Ortega, Dichen Lachman (Dollhouse, The 100) as Reileen Kawahara, Chris Conner as Poe, Ato Essandoh (Django Unchained) as Vernon Ellott, Marlene Forte (Dallas) as Alazne Ortega, Trieu Tran as Mister Leung, Byron Mann (Arrow) as "OG Kovacs" (possibly another sleeve for Kovacs) and Tamara Taylor (Bones) as Oumou Prescott.

No airdate for Altered Carbon has yet been set, but it is likely to be at the end of this year or early next.

James Purefoy cast in Netflix's version of ALTERED CARBON

Netflix has announced casting news for Altered Carbon, its cyberpunk TV series based on the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan.

Joining Joel Kinnaman, who has already been cast as Takeshi Kovacs (or rather his Earthbound "sleeve" or body), are James Purefoy, Martha Higareda, Dichen Lachman and Leonardo Nam.

James Purefoy is best-known to genre fans from his excellent turn as Mark Anthony in HBO's Rome. Since then he has starred in Blackbeard, Camelot and The Following on TV and is currently starring in Hap & Leonard for Sundance TV. His film credits include Ironclad, John Carter, Solomon Kane and the recent High-Rise.

Purefoy will be playing Laurens Bancroft, a centuries-old super rich member of the elite class known as Methuselahs. This is the kind of finely-characterised, meaty role that Purefoy revels in.

Mexican actress Martha Higareda (Royal Pains) will play police officer Kristin Ortega, whilst Dichen Lachman (Dollhouse, The 100, Agents of SHIELD) will play Reileen Kawahara, Kovacs's sister. Leonardo Nam (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Westworld) will play the young Takeshi Kovacs (the original body Kovacs was born into) in flashback sequences.

The first episode of Altered Carbon will be directed by Miguel Sapochnik (Game of Thrones) and the series is expected to debut in late 2017.

ALTERED CARBON TV series greenlit by Netflix

Richard Morgan's classic cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon has been greenlit by Netflix as a ten-episode television series. This isn't an option or an "in-development" deal, but an actual guarantee to make the series.

Laeta Kalogridis, a producer and writer who has worked on Shutter Island, Avatar and Terminator: Genisys, is bringing the project to the screen. She has been trying to get the series made for several years and is a huge fan of the novel and the overall book series.

Altered Carbon is the first of six (so far) novels set in a coherent future universe. The first three - Altered Carbon (2002), Broken Angels (2003) and Woken Furies (2005), sometimes called The Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy - are set in the 25th Century and revolve around the titular soldier and mercenary, who hops from body to body on different worlds to complete missions and jobs for shadowy forces. Kovacs is noted for his intelligence and his ability to both hold a grudge and coldly execute it if he feels wronged. He also has something of a conscience, which gets in the way of his work.

The three later books in the setting form the Land Fit For Heroes Trilogy - The Steel Remains (2008), The Cold Commands (2011) and The Dark Defiles (2014) - which is set many thousands of years in the future and is actually a post-singularity, post-transcendence (kind of), Dying Earth-style epic fantasy. It is unknown if the rights to the fantasy trilogy are part of this deal, but probably not, as the links between the two series are fairly mild.

This is not the only Morgan book under development. His classic 2007 SF novel Black Man (known as Thirteen in the United States) is also under option as a feature film.

The airdate for Altered Carbon (assuming that's the name for the entire TV show) is unknown, but the earliest date is likely to be in the back half of 2017.

ALTERED CARBON film rights re-optioned

This is slightly older news (from February) but something that had managed to slip past my radar. Mythology Entertainment, a newly-formed production company, has secured the movie rights to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's debut novel and the first featuring his body-hopping protagonist Takeshi Kovacs. The deal also includes the book's two sequels, Woken Furies and Broken Angels, though presumably not his 'fantasy' trilogy which is set in the distant future of the same setting.

The book was originally optioned by Matrix producer Joel Silver shortly after the novel was published, allowing Morgan to become a full-time writer after completing only just one book. This attempt to make a film came to nothing. A second attempt during the 2008 Writer's Guild of America Strike (when the studios were looking at using completed-but-unmade scripts to put into production to get around the lack of new scripts being written) also came to nothing.

Laeta Kalogridis, the executive producer of Avatar and scriptwriter of Shutter Island, will co-pen the script along with David Goodman. Interesting to see if this gets made or languishes in development hell for several years. I am particularly interested to see how they handle the problem of the film requiring several actors to play the hero (as Kovacs is 're-sleeved' several times in different bodies).

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

It's a world where human beings have become digital information, swapped between bodies, backed up on computer hard drives and sometimes illegally copied. It's a world where centuries-old rich folk have formed an elite watching over the rest of the human race. It's a world utterly unprepared to deal with a man named Takeshi Kovacs. Welcome to Earth in the 25th Century.


Altered Carbon, first published in 2002, is the debut novel by British SF author Richard Morgan and also the first to feature his antihero Takeshi Kovacs. Since the book was published, two sequels have followed: Broken Angels (2003) and Woken Furies (2005). Morgan has also written two non-Kovacs novels, Market Forces (2004) and the forthcoming Black Man (2007). He has also announced that his next project will be a fantasy trilogy, the first book of which has the interesting title of A Land Fit for Heroes. But it's his debut novel I am concerned with here.

Altered Carbon comes very highly recommended and, for the most part, this can be agreed with. This is a book with serious attitude, with a take-no-prisoners approach as body-hopping ex-Envoy Takeshi Kovacs (think of an entire SAS platoon rolled into one person) is freed from prison (digital storage) in return for investigating the murder of a wealthy 'Meth', one of the long-lived elite who effectively control Earth. Kovacs may be a hardened killer and a one-man army, but he's from the provincial colonies with no clue how life works on the old homeworld and it's this juxtaposition - an experienced warrior in an unfamiliar environment - that gives Morgan a way of feeding us information on this futuristic society. Sometimes he misses the target completely: a very implausible conversation in a diner lets us handily know that an advanced alien civilisation used to exist on Mars and they left behind the locations of many other inhabitable worlds, giving mankind a roadmap to follow in its colonisation of the Galaxy. It's a fascinating idea, but very clunkily handled.

It's a tribute to Morgan's writing that this is just about the only flaw I could find in the book. Otherwise it's a clever, often exceptionally violent trawl through the underworld of a far-future San Francisco, taking in heavy torture and a heavy bodycount along the way. A strong stomach is certainly recommended for some parts of the book. There's a great line in dark humour (Kovacs' sidekick through part of the book is the sentient AI system that runs his hotel) and some very well-realised characters as well.

The SF thriller has undergone something of a renaissance in the last decade. Isaac Asimov arguably first mastered the genre back in the 1950s with his Elijah Bailey novels (The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, plus their much-delayed sequel, The Robots of Dawn) before cyberpunk dipped its toes in the pond, but Peter F. Hamilton's enjoyable Greg Mandel Trilogy brought it back into focus in the early 1990s before Alastar Reynolds' excellent Chasm City was released in 2001. Morgan sits amongst their ranks with ease. Hamilton is a big fan and I'm pretty convinced that some of the body-hopping and rejeuvenating antics in his recent Commonwealth Saga (combined with a futuristic detective subplot) may have been influenced by this book.

I'm now looking forward to picking up and reading the sequel.

Altered Carbon (****) is available from Gollancz in the United Kingdom and Del Rey in the United States.