Show, Don’t Tell …

 

…What does that even mean?

The other night my son and I were discussing a Netflix show he was watching,  Altered Carbon, a new show classified as neo-noir. While some of it was good, he’d realized he had finally identified what wasn’t working for it.

First off, there was a lack of nuance in it. Emotionally-speaking there were no gray areas. Two things in the show’s world – religion and elitism – were written as bad, equally bad, with no mitigating circumstances for anything. This moral code...