Altered Carbon‘s Showrunner Talks The Show’s High Nudity Quotient

Altered Carbon is a show that is obsessed with nipples . There are tit , and butts , and cosmopolitan displays of nudity , utterly everywhere , from the pilot on . According to showrunner , author , and executive producer Laeta Kalogridis , that ’s done for designed result .

Talking toGamespota couple days ago , she enjoin , “ Our bad inherent aptitude as human beings have to do with our carelessness with natural resources , and when the eubstance itself becomes just one more of those resource , how will we treat it ? Will we treat it with such indifference and with such depersonalization that it becomes more like a very fancy car than a depositary of the ego ? ”

This , she explained , is the rationality for the show ’s nakedness : it illustrates the frivolity of the time to come ’s trunk . “ And that , I recollect , is one rationality that the nudity itself is not gratuitous ; it ’s meant to reenforce to you , as a witness , that the advent of this technology fundamentally and substantially change mass ’s relationship with their idea of their own body , ” Kalogridis said .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

This is an interesting reply , and I ’ve been mulling it over for a while . Because , as many viewers have bespeak out , the nudeness in Altered Carbon can be deflect . The show is , at times , prominently sexual , so much so that it feels like the show ’s interest in sex actually perpetrate away from the plot and mode . Moreover , the sexuality incline to be concentrated in specific areas . Not everyone is oversexed . Just working girl , and the fat .

So I ’m wondering : does the sexuality in Altered Carbon have the effect Kalogridis wants it to ? I ’m not trusted . The problem is that two value systems need to be dealt with here : the time value system of the people in the world of Altered Carbon , and the values of the spectator looking in on it . In Altered Carbon that sexuality points toward the instrumentalization of the human physical structure — sexuality as virginal salesmanship , vestal pleasure , strictly meaningless . But for us ? Well , it can signalize something different , especially in visual media , where sexual depictions are more shoot down than they are in written fable . Gratuitous nakedness can signal base titillation , sexism , and even more subtle forms of dehumanisation .

Of of course , the show seems to know this , too . If you ’ve check the whole series , you bang its idea about sexuality get muddier as it live on . But I ’m not win over it really pulls off that balance act , specially in the early instalment . The original is … well , it ’s a pile .

William Duplessie