Published Sep 2, 2026, 8:02 PM EDT
Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.
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While Netflix’s mix of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell was canceled way too soon, the iconic cyberpunk series is finally getting the recognition that it has always deserved years later. It’s a historically great time to be a fan of sci-fi TV shows, even if the genre’s version of The Wire, The Expanse, ended in 2022. The amount of innovative, ambitious, inventive shows available to viewers is almost unprecedented.
In the 1960s, sci-fi fans watching small-screen entertainment had to be content with one or two classics like The Twilight Zone or Star Trek: The Original Series, whereas viewers on 2026 can choose between the multiverse thriller Dark Matter, the dystopian conspiracy story Silo, the anti-capitalist satire Severance, or the thrilling Asimov adaptation Foundation. The best part is, that’s just Apple TV’s offerings in the genre.
Hulu has Paradise, Peacock has Continuum, Prime Video has Tales from the Loop, and Paramount+ has a slew of recent Star Trek shows including Strange New Worlds and Picard. However, amid all of these modern classics, one notable Netflix series was missed by many fans of the genre. Debuting in 2018, Altered Carbon lasted only two seasons before the show was unceremoniously canceled by Netflix, even though it is arguably one of the best cyberpunk series ever made.
*Altered Carbon *was quickly dismissed as another short-lived Netflix sci-fi show, but it was far more than this. Adapted from author Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel of the same name, Altered Carbon’s dense plot takes place in a future where the richest and most powerful people in the world are able to effectively cheat death through a process known as “resleeving,” wherein their consciousness can be implanted in a new body.
In this setting, over 350 years into the future, the political prisoner Takeshi Kovacs is released from his high security sentence by Meth Laurens Bancroft, a shadowy elite who is one of the world’s richest men. So far, the cyberpunk show’s plot has echoes of Ridley Scott’s *Blade Runner *and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, but the truly ingenious innovation comes when Meth Laurens Bancroft reveals why Kovacs was released.
Bancroft wants Kovacs to solve Bancroft’s own murder, having resleeved in time to avoid dying permanently. This twisty premise introduces viewers to a world indebted to earlier cyberpunk writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, wherein man and machine meld at every turn and no one is quite who they seem. Breathlessly paced, original, and pulsing with paranoia, Altered Carbon is a must-watch for sci-fi fans.
Sadly, the series was canceled after only two seasons, meaning Altered Carbon devoted a ton of screen time to explaining its complex world, only to have little runtime left to explore this setting. To make matters worse, the years that followed have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Netflix hit was ahead of its time.
Recently, 2025’s The Copenhagen Test was another critically acclaimed sci-fi thriller that fused technological paranoia with an old-fashioned conspiracy storyline. Meanwhile, 2027’s upcoming Apple TV adaptation Neuromancer and 2026’s spinoff Blade Runner: 2099 prove that cyberpunk shows are all the rage now, only a few years after the premature cancellation of Altered Carbon.
With their neon-drenched cityscapes, cynical visions of the future, and constant blending of the lines between technology and the body, these shows prove that cyberpunk is thriving on the small screen in the 2020s. Prime Video’s short-lived The Peripheral was another victim of arriving too early for this trend, but it is these upcoming titles that show just how much Netflix’s ***Altered Carbon ***was ahead of its time when the show mixed the Ghost in the Shell franchise with Blade Runner back in 2018.
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Science Fiction
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2018 - 2020-00-00