Sci-fi streaming has been all the rage in 2025 thanks to new series like Vince Gilligan’s “Pluribus” and Noah Hawley’s “Alien: Earth” along with returning favorites like “Severance” and “Stranger Things.” And while we already cast our votes for the best sci-fi shows of 2025, it’s often worth scrolling back a few years to unearth other genre gems. We did just that and were pleasantly reminded of one of the most underrated sci-fi series of the last decade, “Electric Dreams.” It’s based on the work of author Philip K Dick, who born in 1928 and wrote dozens of novels and more than 100 short stories before his death in 1982.
His 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was adapted by Ridley Scott into the 1982 classic film “Blade Runner” starring Harrison Ford, and he earned one of three writing credits for the film. The anthology series “Electric Dreams” was released in January 2018 and produced by Sony Pictures Television. It was shown on Channel 4 in the UK and Prime Video in the U.S. and each of the ten 50-minute episodes explores a different narrative drawn from the author’s vast trove of short stories. You could probably binge the entire series in a long weekend and see A-listers Bryan Cranston, Steve Buscemi, Anna Paquin, Juno Temple, Janelle Monae, Maura Tierney, and Greg Kinnear.
Critical reception to Electric Dreams was mixed
The critical and popular reception to “Electric Dreams” was mostly favorable, although the series wasn’t universally lauded. Review aggregator Metacritic scores “Electric Dreams” 68 out of 100 based on published reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes shows a 72% approval rating from audiences and a 75% from critics. Variety reviewer Maureen Ryan wrote “All in all, ‘Electric Dreams’ contains more hits than misses and a couple of real gems.” Boston Globe reviewer Matthew Gilbert was less impressed, proclaiming the series to have “some strong and affecting hours as well as some overly long, poorly designed, and thematically scrambled hours.”
Fans of shows like “Black Mirror,” “Channel Zero,” and “The Twilight Zone” might enjoy the format and subject matter of “Electric Dreams” even if some episodes don’t fully land. Philip K. Dick’s script-to-screen adaptations are frequently added and removed from many of the best streaming platforms of 2025, although you should be able to find it on Prime Video or the Roku Channel. “Total Recall” is one of the most popular sci-fi films based on short stories or novellas, and “Minority Report and “A Scanner Darkly” are also based on his work.
