Television series

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams

Name: Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams
Genre: Drama, Science Fiction, Mystery
Released: 2017

Ten standalone episodes, ten different worlds, one restless brain behind them: Philip K. Dick's paranoid, hallucinatory short stories dragged into glossy anthology TV. Big names (Bryan Cranston, Steve Buscemi, Anna Paquin) drift through stories about surveillance, cloned memory, and reality that keeps sliding underfoot. Quality wobbles episode to episode, but the best instalments are genuinely unsettling. For anyone who likes their sci-fi thoughtful and a little sick with dread.

TVMaze rating

7.8

If you liked this

Black Mirror2011

The obvious cousin — same anthology bones, same appetite for technology curdling into nightmare, sharper writing and a nastier sense of humour about where it's all heading.

But Bleaker and more cynical throughout; less interested in Dick's woolly spirituality than in pure dread.

Blade Runner1982

The granddaddy PKD adaptation — rain-soaked, mournful, and still the best argument that his questions about what makes someone real deserve cinema's full weight.

But Slow by design; if you want plot momentum rather than mood, it will test your patience.

Minority Report2002

Spielberg turns a PKD premise about predicted crime into a slick, propulsive chase movie without losing the paranoid moral rot underneath it.

But More blockbuster than think-piece — the philosophy takes a back seat to Tom Cruise running.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Twilight Zone1959

Electric Dreams is the direct descendant of this show's format and moral logic — short, self-contained parables where a single unsettling idea does all the work. Watching the original shows you the engine before the chrome was added.

Rod Serling did this exact anthology trick decades earlier, in black and white, with twenty-five minutes and a twist ending instead of a big budget cast — and it still lands harder than most of what followed.

But Creaky effects, moralising narration, and a pace that modern viewers may find quaint.

Total Recall1990

PKD's identity-is-a-lie premise played for maximum pulp: Schwarzenegger, gore, Mars, and a plot that keeps yanking the rug out from under you.

But Deliberately trashy and dated — go in for fun, not for subtlety.

The Man in the High Castle2015

A full-series PKD adaptation with room to breathe — an alternate-history America under Axis rule, and the same nagging question of which reality is the real one.

But A slow burn across multiple seasons; commitment required, and the ending divides people.

Love, Death & Robots2019

Another anthology built from short stories, wildly varied in animation style and tone, swinging from cosmic dread to pitch-black comedy within a single episode.

But Uneven by design — some segments are throwaway, and the violence can be gratuitous.

Devs2020

A quiet, meticulous eight-episode meditation on determinism and simulated reality, shot like a religious experience, with the same eerie stillness PKD's best stories have.

But Glacially paced and often chilly; it rewards patience more than it entertains.

Inside No. 92014

Not science fiction, but a masterclass in the anthology format — every half-hour episode a self-contained twist of genre and tone, often unbearably clever.

But British theatrical wit rather than sci-fi dread; the connection is structural, not thematic.

Undone2019

Rotoscoped animation lets this show bend reality the way PKD's prose does — a woman's grip on time and memory unravelling in genuinely strange, moving ways.

But Emotionally heavier and more intimate than plot-driven; less concerned with big sci-fi ideas than grief.

A Scanner Darkly2006

Same author, wildly different medium — animation as a way of literalising the reality-melting subject matter that Electric Dreams can only suggest with cinematography.

Richard Linklater rotoscoped an entire PKD novel into a woozy, hallucinatory animated film about surveillance and drug-fried identity — genuinely one of the strangest studio releases of its decade.

But The animation style is disorienting on purpose, and the plot dissolves into paranoid fog by design.

eXistenZ1999

It's the same simulated-reality paranoia Electric Dreams keeps returning to, just recostumed as visceral horror instead of restrained TV drama — proof the idea survives a much trashier, nastier register.

David Cronenberg takes the 'which layer of reality am I actually in' premise Dick loved and drags it into squelchy, organic body horror — game pods plugged into spines, nothing trustworthy including your own skin.

But Deliberately grotesque and slippery; if body horror turns your stomach, this will overwhelm the ideas underneath it.