Electric Dreams

I'm going into this without much knowledge of Philip K Dick and the whole Black Mirrors series (and really enjoying it). I have to say I really like this show. It has interesting stories, some could probably use a little more than 50 minutes to get a better grasp at the characters and the story to really make an impact. But with how they are, they are well done. The cast is amazing, full of well known actors and actresses. The episodes were beautifully shot, so from an aesthetic stand point, it was nice to watch. The stores are interesting sci-fi, leaving me with something to think about, rather than just thinking "well that's pretty cool." I think if you go into this not comparing it to Black Mirrors, you will enjoy it. If you compare, you will more than likely be disappointed, well, because it's not Black Mirrors. Both shows, in my opinion, are very well done, so I won't say one is better than the other. If you love sci-fi and the Twilight Zone feel, you will like this.

I've enjoyed the whole series of stories. Well acted, great sets, great effects, good design. I have also enjoyed reading the works of P K Dick. The short stories are excellent and introduced many of the key ideas upon which all sci-fi was based. However watching the shows and reading the stories are two different things.

There is barely anything to compare them except perhaps a single key idea. The situations are changed, the characters are different, the settings, to time-frame, just about everything in the TV series is altered.

Are today's writers so devoid of ideas, that they have to take ideas some of them over sixty years old? Or is it that the TV corporate entities are such poor judges of writing talent that they dare not fund a series unless it has some big name at the top of the bill to exploit.

I'd hope that Mr. Dick, were he alive would enjoy the series, but I can't help thinking that he would not recognise his own story were is name not plastered over the top of the credits, and if it were not he'd be saying ' "oh I think I had an idea a bit similar to that in 1958"

I was really excited to watch Stan's original Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams but after watching the series I feel like they should have taken PKD's name out of the title.

After realizing they changed a lot of the endings to his original stories it made sense why the plots of the episodes felt misguided and confusing. PKD is a very clear cut writer, granted his novels such as Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? are a little "Inception-Like" in that some things are left a little unclear but for the most part he has very concise and clear endings to his stories because he's trying to convey a meaningful message.

Many of the episodes of this series use his source material extremely loosely and seem to use the film adaptations of his books as inspiration more than his actual books making them feel more like general sci-fi themed stories than true PKD ones. I also can't help but think of Black Mirror while watching and it feels as though they're simply trying to recreate the feeling of that.

I appreciate the way they use 70's iconography and keep the future looking gritty and focusing on the negative applications advanced technology can have as well as the benefits. The bleak outlook he always had on literally everything especially relationships is also quite prominent. On a whole it sort of does feel like Philip K. Dick but it really could have done a lot better if it had simply stuck to the source material and kept the endings true to them. For instance "Impossible Planet" had a much better ending in his story than the show tried to come up with, I get that the creators want to have some fun but if you're taking directly off of a master and then only changing a few things around you're going to fail since it was already great to begin with, that's why it's so well known. As they say, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

I've read several critics' reviews comparing this show to Black Mirror as if it fails in comparison. I don't think that's accurate. Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams is visually, thematically and, most importantly, narratively interesting. What is real or normal? What makes a human? Meanwhile, there are at least 2 episodes from S4 of Black Mirror that don't measure up to what I've seen so far in Electric Dreams, and apparently I've been watching the dud episodes, per critics' reviews.

Does everything need to have some heightened level of abstraction to be interesting? I don't think so; straightforward storytelling with very good actors set in a world that's different than my own that makes me think is good enough for me.

Worth your time.

The Hood Maker was an episode inspired by - but very different to - the short story by Phillip K Dick but the world created on the screen was one I recognized from both Blade Runner and the many short stories Dick wrote from the 1950s onward.

It was dark but laced with a cynical, dry humour - Dick's forte - and was complex and adult - even hard to watch in places - so well done on not copping out on the darker aspects of Dick's work, even for a mass TV audience.

For those who complain about the show changing the stories (but keeping the themes), try comparing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Blade Runner: Dick's imagination was possibly too wild for any scene-for-scene adaption of his work, as his radically different movie adaptions suggest.

Overall, I was very encouraged by the first episode and look forward to the rest of this intelligent, visually enticing series.