Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Drama
A diverse anthology of ambitious, moving tales inspired by Philip K Dick's short stories.
Top-rated
Mon,
05 Mar, 2018
S1.E8Autofac
Despite society and the world as we know it having collapsed, a massive, automatic product-manufacturing factory continues to operate according to the principles of consumerism - humans consume products to be happy, and in order to consume continuously, they must be denied freedom of choice and free will. When a small band of rebels decide to shut down the factory, they discover they may actually be the perfect consumers after all.
Top-rated
Sun,
15 Oct, 2017
S1.E5Real Life
Sarah, a policewoman living in the future, shares headspace with George, a brilliant game designer. In a race against time, sharing a bond that no one else can see, they learn the very thing that connects them can also destroy them.
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User reviews1
Review
Featured review
Generally a strong cast, although there are exceptions, they guy from Game of Thrones is a stand-out for charisma vaccuum, but you've got Timothy Spall, Benedict Wong, Bryan Cranston etcetera etcetera - in fact, there's pretty much every reason for this to be good, with excellent source material and an excellent cast.
I suspect as this was a co-production by Channel 4 (UK) and Amazon (fronting the monies) that this was used as some kind of testing ground for directors to have an episode each.
The problem is that none of them are good. Passable, sure, but not good and certainly not great. I'm not going to write much beyond the first episode as I'm going to match the effort that's gone into this.
You get GoT's nepo-baby as future-detective, you know he's a detective because he's wearing a noir-style detective hat... it follows the story fairly faithfully, but that's not how you throw a petrol bomb at police - you'd throw many and have a source of petrol to douse between their feet - but who cares about realism when you've got "angsty", detective noir-hat to suck the life out of every scene. I very nearly canned the entire thing at this point.
Again, it follows the story fairly well, but it's just so unambitious and lifeless, at best it looks like a high-end advert for a kitchen appliace (as opposed to a car (which would have been far more ambition than we got)) and has about as much emotional pull.
After a clumsy, charmless start there's 9 more episodes that get a bit better, but again all in the hands of the cast and falls through the fingers of various directors.
Skip the first episode if you have a rainy day and nothing else to watch, it's fairly passable.
wulfgold16 Dec, 2024
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