Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Amazon has released the first trailer for the upcoming Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and it is as promising as we hoped! The anthology show will star Bryan Cranston, Anna Paquin, Steve Buscemi, and a whole host of other luminaries. The showrunners gathered at New York Comic-Con along with actor Liam Cunningham and Isa Dick-Hackett to discuss their plans for the show.

Click through for the full trailer, plus panel highlights!

Michael Dinner, Ronald D. Moore, and David Kanter, and Liam Cunningham, who you might remember from a cult show called Game of Thrones, joined Isa Dick-Hackett and the cast and showrunners of Man in the High Castle for the panel. Asked how he got involved, Moore said he was taken with the idea because he’d never read the batch of short stories the anthology drew from, so it was an opportunity to dive into them.

Dinner said that they worked with a huge cast because “we thought it would be interesting to invite people into the sandbox with us.” He continued by talking about Isa Dick Hackett’s longstanding plan to adapt the stories by inviting writers and directors to adapt the ones they were most taken with. The episodes will all be unique, but “linked by common themes.”

Dick-Hackett added to this saying:

I think the short stories are gems in his career. We wanted to pair people with the right sensibilities and make a partnership by letting them select something that spoke to them. Really, it is ten small films, with a broad range of themes. I thought that was a way to bring in new voices and diversity in work.

David Kanter added that the challenge of the show was formatting the stories to fit into the rigid structure of a 42 –minute episode of television. “Some stories are super conceptual, and some are adaptations of several stories combined, but the most interesting were the ones where the writers really freely adapted the stories, to explore what those stories meant to them.”

Liam Cunningham refused to give us any Game of Thrones spoilers, but did say that he received the scripts yesterday, and that he’s going home in a few days for the table read. Speaking about coming over to Electric Dreams, he spoke about his episode “Human Is” in glowing terms, referred to Bryan Cranston as “a god” and related his experience seeing Total Recall in the front row of a packed movie theater in Dublin. “As a fan I had this amazing first experience of Philip K. Dick.”

Answering the question of whether there would be a Total Recall-esque questioning of reality in Electric Dreams, Michael Dinner confirmed, “It will run through all the shows,” and Ron Moore, dancing around spoilers, said that his episode will feature two people, played by Anna Paquin and Terrence Howard, who are questioning their realities, and, in fact, wondering if they’re the same person. “We embraced the theme of ‘What does it mean to be human?’”

So excited! Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams will come out next year on Amazon Prime.

[via io9!]

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Leah Schnelbach

Author

Intellectual Junk Drawer from Pittsburgh.
Learn More About Leah
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments