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Stargate survivor Richard Zeman, Rocketeer man Billy Campbell and Supernova veteran Peter Fonda among the citizens of New America, an outer-space colony with independence issues. Directed by Michael Rymer, who's overseen many Battlestar Galactica episodes, it has pilot show written all over it. But it never grasps its big themes in the way of Ian McShane's bizarre TV series Kings. It's pitched much more like a TV soap. The colonised planet, a weird mixture of cornfields and space shuttles, looks remarkably like Earth. And so the new frontier looks just like a New Age version of the Old West… which all helps on the Sci Fi Channel's budget front.

The idyllic existence of Fairview advertising executive Michael Muhney is upset by bad dreams and disturbing visions. He's unknowingly experiencing a reality-check in a bracing post-apocalyptic Matrix riff from Australia (which explains the unfamiliar cast). A faceless corporation called Arora has wallpapered-over the real world with pacifying signals sent direct to the brain: this is a world where you can buy a new car every day at 1950s prices and your unflaggingly cheerful parents talk in reassuring platitudes, a place where Kurt Cobain sings children's songs and Marilyn Monroe makes movies with Leonardo DiCaprio. Mixing paint-box colours with grimy black-and-white, director Michael Pattinson conjures up a delusional universe that repels and attracts in equal measure. This curious picture lifts good ideas from impeccable sources: the too-perfect nostalgic small-town setting of Pleasantville, the sealed perimeters of The Thirteenth Floor, the out-of-wack office of The Truman Show, the on-screen catalogue tags of Fight Club, the paintings of Rene Magritte. Even though it's consistently engaging, like so many Outer Limits-style tales, the more it's explained, the less interesting it becomes. This could be because the dialogue sounds as though it's been lifted wholesale from comic-book speech-bubbles. Even so, the conflicting ideas gnaw: Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living is all very well, but would we want to know the truth if the truth is unbearable?

Laura Fraser creates her ideal man on a virtual reality machine and he's suddenly brought to life, of course. Oh what jolly japes don't ensue in a Britcom flop so Day-Glo bright yet so dismal it manages to make the execrable 1980s American teen flick Weird Science look almost decent. The sex-obsessed script is by The Sun film critic Nick Fisher, a former teeny-mag 'agony uncle' who's obviously never watched an episode of Smack The Pony in his life; shame, because then he might at least have been in with a shout of writing female characters that were recognisably members of the human race. This knicker-twisting lot have all too clearly emerged from the virtual brain of someone who imagines they're amusing. Suddenly, the thought of new-wave Iranian cinema is somehow attractive.