At New York Comic Con, Amazon Studios unveiled a trailer for its upcoming anthology show, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. The series will be all about questioning what is real. The show shared the stage with the company’s other Philip K. Dick show, The Man in the High Castle, showing off their common ground.
The snippets from the upcoming season give fans a preview of what will arrive to US Amazon Prime subscribers at some point in 2018. The show is presently airing on the UK’s Channel 4.
Dick’s work is frequently adapted by Hollywood, resulting in films such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Screamers, and others. His daughter, Isa Dick Hackett, said she saw his short stories as hidden gems within his back catalog, and that they encouraged the writers for each episode to approach adapting the stories in ways that spoke to them the most.
The show’s first season will contain 10 standalone episodes based off of the author’s shorter works. During the panel, show producer Michael Dinner said they approached the late author’s work as a larger sandbox, and noted that they thought of each episode as a mini movie, rather than a episode of television.
Cast and crew of The Man in the High Castle noted that the next season of the show will delve into similar territory, where it will explore more of the multiple worlds that were revealed in the show’s latest season. The very heart of the show, Hackett said, is examining what it means to be human “in an inhumane world.”
Ultimately, she says, the television environment brought about by streaming services helped make these adaptations of her father’s work possible, and allows them to delve into the abstract themes that Philip K. Dick is known for, such as questioning the nature of reality, and what it really means to be human.