Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams

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.