The family drama is fertile ground for storytelling. If you can get beyond the love-hate-relationship cliches, there is ample room to explore the whole gamut of human emotions along with politics and social issues.

This is what beloved shows such as This Is Us (2016 to present), Brothers And Sisters (2006 to 2011) and Roseanne (1988 to 1997) have all managed to do. And it is in this space that Here And Now - from the Oscar-and Emmy-winning creator Alan Ball (American Beauty, 1999; Six Feet Under, 2001 to 2005) - sets up its stall.

It offers a sweeping look at America's fraying social tapestry, as seen through the eyes of a white couple, philosophy professor Greg Boatwright (Tim Robbins) and wife Audrey Bayer (Holly Hunter), and their multi-coloured family.

There is Duc (Raymond Lee), whom they adopted as a child from Vietnam; Ashley (Jerrika Hinton), adopted from Liberia; Ramon, adopted from Colombia; and their youngest, Kristen (Sosie Bacon), their only biological child.

Family dynamics are thus a neat microcosm of liberal America's struggles with race and identity politics.

The parents love their children, but the kids cannot help but feel they are being paraded as symbols of mum and dad's progressiveness.

Duc and Ashley also notice their parents have an easier time relating to their two white children.

Kristen, meanwhile, feels painfully vanilla next to her exotic siblings and think they have it easier because of it. Yet she is blind to how badly Ashley, a black woman, is treated compared with her when the two are arrested following a skirmish.

Meanwhile, Greg is turning 60 and is in the throes of a mid-life meltdown, one that challenges his professional philosophical defence of hedonism (living in the "here and now") in favour of an increasingly pessimistic view of the human race and the liberal project.

And the biggest wrinkle of all: Ramon is having strange dreams and visions, which may or may not be all in his head.

Only four of the 10 episodes were given to reviewers and the first two episodes are promising - densely packed with astute observations about race and identity that one does not often see.

There are subtle nods to the fact Ashley married a white guy, and a fleeting moment in a bar that suggests Duc does not like dating Asian girls, perhaps out of a sense of self-loathing.

There is also an intriguing subplot involving similar identity struggles within the family of Ramon's Muslim therapist.

But in episodes 3 and 4, the show starts to lose momentum and feels somewhat pedestrian.

The philosophical debates surrounding Greg's work begin to get repetitive and, with all the build-up, there is a distinct risk that Ramon's visions will end in an anticlimax.

It is anybody's guess where it is all headed.

Altered Carbon, a cyberpunk thriller, is set in a dystopian future reminiscent of Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix films (1999 and 2003).

Human consciousness can now be downloaded onto computer chips or "stacks", and the bodies that house them are virtually interchangeable and called "sleeves".

After 250 years spent "asleep" in Alcatraz prison, a former elite soldier, Takeshi Kovacs, wakes up to find his mind has been downloaded into a new body.

This was done at the behest of the uber-rich Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who wants Kovacs to investigate his murder - Bancroft's body was killed moments before his mind or stack was backed up to a satellite, then downloaded again into a new sleeve.

In flashbacks, the Japanese-Slovakian Takeshi is played by two Asian-American actors, Byron Mann and Will Yun Lee.

But his mind is then conveniently decanted into the blond, buff frame of actor Joel Kinnaman for most of the show - a la Scarlett Johansson in Ghost In The Shell (2017), where her character is a Japanese woman in a white body.

The conventionality of that casting move serves as a handy metaphor for the series as a whole. There are a few intriguing ideas in the premise - notably about the ethics and commodification of immortality, and the mind-body separation - but there is no follow-through.

The show quickly sinks into a muddled morass of science-fiction and action-movie cliches that the expensive-looking production values cannot rescue.

The final nail in the coffin is some truly awful dialogue and acting, which conspire to produce several groan-inducing performances, especially by Martha Higareda, who plays Kovacs' highly annoying ally.

If only we could download the DNA of the premise into a better show.