Electric Dreams: Inspired by Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction, Powered by the Stars

Are you watching the new Electric Dreams anthology series? Just released on Amazon, each episode is based on a Philip K. piece of science fiction. The title is a nod to Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? brought to the screen as Blade Runner.

We’ve watched three episodes, and unlike Black Mirror, in which the stories are unified by the places technology has taken us, these episodes don’t seem to have an overall theme. Tied only by the thread of ‘dreams’ each show is free to be something entirely different from each other. Although my husband and I did note the three episodes we saw all featured some fairly sexy sizzle. Don’t know if that’s an overarching theme going forward or not.

Some of the sizzle is star power. 

Janelle Monáe plays a robot in Autofac, an episode about a dystopian post-apocalyptic world where automation carries on regardless of need, while Anna Paquin and Terence Howard appeared in Real Life which looked directly at dreams.

Bryan Cranston, executive producer of the show, also starred in Human Is, my favorite of the three episodes we saw as it centers on the tense relationship between a man and woman in a well established marriage. The fact that it features Cranston’s wife going off to some futuristic club for some old fashioned three way sex was a bit of an unexpected (and unnecessary*) jolt but it didn’t bother me enough not to enjoy the payoff of the episode. *We get it, she’s unhappy.

Other episodes feature Timothy Spall in The Commuter with Tuppence Middleton. Impossible Planet stars Jack Reynor and Geraldine Chaplin. Steve Buscemi, Greg Kinnear, Holiday Grainger. Plenty of familiar faces.  There are ten episodes in all, instead of bingeing, we’ll parcel them out bit by bit. 

I’m looking forward to Kill All Others, for two reasons. One, because it’s directed by Dee Rees, who did such an amazing job with Mudbound. And two, it not only stars Vera Farmiga, the episode also features Mudbound star Jason Mitchell. 

The way Electric Dreams has been set up, we’ll have no idea what to expect, what places we’ll go, who will take us there. Not a bad way to spend an hour.

I’d love to know what true blue Philip K. Dick’s fans think?