Watch This Overlooked Sci-Fi Series Instead Of Netflix’s The Electric State

Netflix’s “The Electric State” isn’t very good. By most metrics, it’s a complete disaster — a movie so expensive and so devoid of purpose that it honestly defies logic. That’s especially true if you’ve read the book it’s based on by Swedish writer and artist Simon Stålenhag.

Stålenhag’s books each center on different sci-fi ideas, but the format generally stays the same. They’re big books filled with gorgeous digital art of worlds very like our own, but also different. These images are accompanied by one manner or another of prose, telling a linear story or at the very least adding context to the scenes being shown. Where “The Electric State” shows an American landscape devastated by drone warfare and VR addiction, “Tales from the Loop” and “Things from the Flood,” Stålenhag’s two prior books, follow a Swedish town and the mysterious scientific research facility it holds, as well as the various robotic creations and strange phenomenon seen around the countryside. The subject changes, but the tone and style remain the same across books.

In a vacuum, “The Electric State” is bad, but it’s even worse as an adaptation. Stålenhag’s work is melancholic, isolating, and hauntingly beautiful, with tons of interesting ideas tied up in his captivating art. “The Electric State” is a movie where Stanley Tucci commits robot genocide so that his dead mother can give him a cannoli.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative. Back in 2020, Prime Video adapted Stålenhag’s first book, “Tales from the Loop,” into an 8-episode series. It’s fantastic, and depressingly overlooked, so in the interest of sparing as many people as possible the regret of wasting two hours on Netflix’s “Electric State,” I highly recommend you check this show out instead.

Prime Video’s “Tales from the Loop” series got little publicity upon release, despite earning great reviews from critics. It came out during a time when the company seemed more interested in filling the shelves of Prime Video with original content than it was in actually marketing that content to the public. Perhaps as a result (or maybe just because it worked better this way), the show only got one season. But it’s just as good now as it was then, and it’s a much better reflection of Stålenhag’s work than Netflix’s “The Electric State.”

“Tales from the Loop” pretty faithfully adapts the book, but it moves the small Swedish town from Stålenhag’s version to the American Midwest. A mysterious government science facility called the Loop employs a majority of the town’s adults, but the technology within causes strange things to happen to the residents. A girl finds herself misplaced in time. Two friends enter a strange pod that swaps their bodies. A teenage couple finds a way to stop time in the town around them.

Each episode tells a different story, following the model of sci-fi anthology series like “The Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror.” At the same time, characters recur throughout, overlapping the various episodes and creating continuity between the different stories. Showrunner Nathaniel Halpern drew inspiration from Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short story cycle “Winesburg, Ohio,” which similarly focuses on the lonesome emotional lives of small-town characters. The show’s cast includes actors like Rebecca Hall, Jonathan Pryce, Jane Alexander, and Paul Schneider, all of whom turn in great performances. But it’s the overriding tone and production design that really sets “Tales from the Loop” apart.

One of two things happened during production on “The Electric State.” Either the Russos and their creative team fundamentally misunderstood the entire point of the book (which would require an incredible degree of ignorance), or they chose to turn it from a thematically rich, aesthetically stunning sci-fi story into a $320 million “Spy Kids” movie. Other than a few shots and designs, there’s nothing in the movie that carries any of the book’s tone.

“Tales from the Loop,” on the other hand, is a fantastic translation of Stålenhag’s unique genre aesthetic. The blending of advanced sci-fi machinery with empty pastoral landscapes, the focus on silence and negative space, the mystery, it’s all there. The music from composers Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan is particularly memorable, full of somber piano and string ballads that underscore the gorgeous cinematography. “Tales from the Loop” is a show where you can go minutes on end without anyone talking, yet the audio-visual experience is always delicately crafted and deeply emotional. It’s expertly crafted — not surprising given a production team that included Matt Reeves and a pool of directors that featured Jodie Foster and Pixar alum Andrew Stanton.

In other words, it taps into the same ideas that made the book so compelling in the first place. It’s just a shame that “The Electric State” didn’t even try.