By Monique
If you’ve ever wanted to see a big screen adaptation of Janelle Monae’s Cindi Mayweather saga, the closest thing we might get to it is Monae in Amazon and Channel 4’s upcoming anthology series, Electric Dreams.
According to Shadow and Act, the anthology series, which could be Amazon’s version of Black Mirror, will be a 10-episode sci-fi anthology that, like Black Mirror, features stand-alone stories, each written and directed by different writers and directors. However, unlike Black Mirror, the series will be based on Philip K. Dick’s short stories.
Monae’s episode, “Autofac,” sounds like it could be a prototype for an ArchAndroid story:
“Despite society and the world as we know it have 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.”
Dee Rees has been slated to direct one of the Electric Dreams episodes, and Terrence Howard, Jason Mitchell, Benedict Wong, Mel Rodriguez, Bryan Cranston, Steve Buscemi, Greg Kinnear, Timothy Spall, Richard Madden, Jack Reynor, Holliday Grainger, Mireille Enos, Geraldine Chaplin, Vera Farmiga, Sarah Brown, Glenn Morshower and Anna Paquin are among the actors tapped to star in the series. (Cranston will also serve as executive producer).
The trailer doesn’t contain any snippets from Monae’s episode, but it’ll be exciting to see Monae finally act in a genre she reinvented through her music. It would seem that Monae is partly inspired by Dick’s stories (particularly Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that’s the basis for Blade Runner), as well as the classic sci-fi film Metropolis (something that more than likely also inspired Dick), so if this role could serve as the launch pad for an ArchAndroid series, that would be ultra cool.
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Julian 