I’m not going to claim this show has aged well, or that it was even all that great during its peak, but it was cyberpunk.
Created by James Cameron, the show was was about a genetically engineered super soldier (Jessica Alba) who escaped from a secret government facility to hide in the cyberpunk city of Seattle. She works as a bike courier with a bunch of other low-lifes and can barely afford rent. She meets up with an underground activist who’s trying to expose the lies and cover-ups of governments and corporations. Society has totally broken down and the corrupt police force has checkpoints setup between neighborhoods.
So a totally cyberpunk premise, but the show was basically a CW show before the CW existed. It’s all beautiful 20-somethings and cheesy writing. And then season 2 came along and the show was now about all the half-human/half-animal hybrids Jessica Alba helped escape from the secret government facility in the season 1 finale. It got weird.
Here’s a clip from early season 2 where Jessica Alba’s character returns to work after almost dying in the season 1 finale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSKClsvQ4QQ
Yes, her friend’s name is Original Cindy and her boss’s name is Normal.
I’m not sure if I’d call this post a recommendation since I can’t find many good things to say about it. But I’ve seen the entire show and I’m curious if anyone else remembers it and has more fond memories of it than I do.
It has been a long time since I have watched Dark Angel, but I imagine it has not aged well. I do remember it being super cheesy but was fun to watch at the time and definitely had a cyberpunk feel to it.
I remember this show. Liked it when I was a kid but I was a huge fan of such shows then. It kind of has the vibe of a cyberpunk version of Buffy or Charmed.
Damn I forgot about that show. I remember I liked the premise but it was pretty corny even to me in my late teens.
That said if you want to watch something in the same vein that is actually really fucking good not only in its writing and action scenes but in its politics as well (for the most part), I highly recommend Hanna.
It also really surprised me in that it mostly avoided the trope of correctly portraying the US and its imperial allies as villains but pivoting to the evil being done by a handful of bad actors. The primary antagonists throughout most of it are literally the CIA and the State Department (though in the third season it does sort of dip into that trope, but in a sort of reversal wherein the protagonists are the only good people in an otherwise monstrous machine and fighting against that machine makes them targets of the state).
