Image: Anna Paquin in “Real Life” from Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams (Amazon)
Amazon already has a Philip K. Dick show in its adaptation of Man in the High Castle, which is headed into its third season. But Stan also has an anthology series based on Dick’s work available now, called Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. And the executive producers feel like they could adapt the same story more than one time over the years.
In a press even after the panel, executive producer David Kanter said that they sent out packets of short stories to the writers they were approaching, and that everyone pretty much naturally gravitated to different ones, finding things they wanted to focus on. “At some point in the future, should we be so lucky to continue on, some of the stories could be retold,” Kanter said. “Some could be re-adapted by different people and they would be amazing to see from the point of view of how writers and directors work to do that. To take the same source material and have, five years from now, season one’s ‘Human Is’ and season five’s ‘Human Is.’”
Ronald D. Moore, who not only is an executive producer on the series, but wrote the episode “Real Life,” based on the short story “Exhibit Piece,” added, “The one I did is so far removed from the original source material that if another writer came in and read the exact same piece, it would bear no resemblance to what I did. It would be a completely different story.”