When filmmakers and TV showrunners want to drop viewers into a paranoid but all-too-believable future, they return again and again to the same material: the dozens of novels and stories by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
From “Blade Runner” (1982), inspired by the 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” to Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,” based on the 1962 novel of the same name, the adaptations reveal Dick’s stories to be endlessly adaptable tales for modern-day concerns: privacy, corporate control, free will and what it means to be human.
Now Amazon, in partnership with Channel 4 in Britain and Sony Pictures Television, has found perhaps the most natural form to tackle the prolific writer’s catalog: “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams,” a 10-episode anthology show that adapts the writer’s short stories for the first time on TV. (All 10 will be made available to Amazon Prime subscribers on Jan. 12.) The timing couldn’t be better. Not only does the series grapple with questions evermore relevant in our increasingly technologically augmented times, but it is tailor-made for a format that’s helped TV enter a new golden age.
In the seven years since Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk created “American Horror Story,” with completely different story lines and characters each season, anthology shows have become home to some of the most ambitious and creative storytelling on TV. With “Electric Dreams” the format takes its next evolutionary step, with a new story and creative team for each episode.
The approach is unlike that of “American Horror Story” or FX’s other major anthology success, Noah Hawley’s “Fargo,” where stories unwind over an entire season. And it differs from shows like HBO’s “Room 104,” where the stories and cast change every episode but all are driven by the distinct auteur sensibility of the Duplass Brothers (the show’s creators), which lends a tonal seamlessness from week to week.
Continue reading the main storyBy contrast, the “Electric Dreams” creative teams, which include veterans of “The Night Manager,” “Stranger Things” and the Harry Potter universe, were given free rein by the showrunner, Michael Dinner, to veer wildly from episode to episode, from satirical to earnest to deeply, psychedelically strange. “Everyone is trying to do original things to stand out, so you’re not boxed into a format anymore,” said one of the executive producers, Ronald D. Moore, who is best known for creating the acclaimed 2004 “Battlestar Galactica” reboot.
If “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams” is directly challenging any show, though, it’s Netflix’s technology-run-amok series “Black Mirror,” which is now in its fourth season. Both owe a major debt to an earlier wave of anthology programming, particularly turn-of-the-’60s series like “Playhouse 90,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and, especially, “The Twilight Zone.” “In some ways we had to talk to about ‘Twilight Zone’ in order to not copy it,” Mr. Moore said. “We’d say, well ‘Twilight Zone’ did this, let’s do something else.”
There are some clear advantages to the anthology format. For one, shows can be written in satisfying movie-like arcs, rather than the open-ended storytelling that traditional TV requires. And major stars are much more willing to sign on for a single season, or in the case of “Electric Dreams,” a single episode. “We had so many actors who were interested because of that,” Mr. Moore said. “It was like, ‘Oh, I can come in for five days and get it done?’ That’s a very appealing prospect.”
The actors attracted to the series included Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad” (also one of the show’s executive producers), Steve Buscemi, Maura Tierney and the avant-R&B singer Janelle Monáe. And “Electric Dreams” attracted writers and directors like Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), Peter Horton (“American Odyssey,” “Thirtysomething”) and Alan Taylor (“Game of Thrones”).
Dick’s daughter, Isa Dick Hackett, whose production company Electric Shepherd oversees adaptations of her father’s work, reached out in 2012 to Mr. Dinner, executive producer of FX’s “Justified,” and invited him to look at the short stories. “Michael really had the idea to do it as anthology,” said Mr. Moore, a friend of Mr. Dinner’s who was brought on soon after.
Mr. Dinner, who had a deal with Sony, also recruited Mr. Cranston, who, like the others, is a major Philip K. Dick fan. All four brought in people they’d worked with as well as reaching out to talent they admired. “I sent Janelle Monáe a letter and asked her if she’d want to be a part of it,” Ms. Hackett said. “I knew that she was a big fan of my dad’s.”
Episodes include “The Commuter,” starring Timothy Spall, about a mysterious British town that doesn’t appear on any maps, and Mr. Cranston’s “Human Is,” which ponders whether it’s better to be married to a to a total jerk or an attentive guy who happens to be bodysnatched by an alien. Mr. Moore wrote the episode “Real Life,” which stars Terrence Howard and Anna Paquin and deals with virtual reality. And Ms. Monáe plays an android who falls in with a band of post-apocalyptic survivors in her episode, “Autofac.”
But the show’s creative freedom came at a cost in terms of complexity and difficulty for the producers. Scheduling and delivery pressures required two concurrent full-scale productions in London and Chicago. Each episode needed new sets, costumes, locations, casts and more. “It’s backbreaking,” Mr. Moore said. “None of us knew how much more expensive and time-consuming this would be than a typical show.”
It’s a little hard to believe now, but during his lifetime Dick was a fringe figure, even in science fiction circles. “I don’t think he would ever have imagined that ‘Jeopardy’ would have a Philip K. Dick category,” Ms. Hackett said of her father.
And what would he have made of a TV series based on his work, hosted on a newfangled thing called a streaming service that is available to watch at any time and on all sorts of devices? “The way that he felt about his work being adapted is ambivalent,” she said. “But I think he would love that every person that took this on did it because they love his work and wanted to do their version of P.K.D. There’s love all over it.”
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