While Peacock and Paramount+ have both struggled to fill out their libraries with juicy original content, Amazon Prime has more than a decade’s worth of shows under its belt. A lot of them have been forgettable, but there have been both enduring classics like Bosch and underrated gems like Paper Girls throughout the streamer’s tenure.
Reacher is still going strong after four seasons and a spinoff. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel took a five-season journey through the 1950s comedy scene. The Boys recently ended with a whimper, not a bang. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is still waiting for that $1 billion investment to pay off. Fleabag is frequently ranked as one of the greatest TV shows of the 21st century, but it was disappointingly brief (as are most British comedies).
All those shows still hold up, but they’re years and years old at this point. What has Prime been doing recently? What are the best new shows they’ve released in the past couple of years? From Spider-Noir to Neagley to Carrie, Prime has been on a spectacular run with its original programming lately.
Ride Or Die
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The plot of Ride or Die is nothing groundbreaking — it cobbles together a bunch of different action tropes and clichés for a serviceable enough narrative — but the specifics of the plot don’t matter any more here than they did in Heads of State or Mr. & Mrs. Smith; it’s just an excuse to get two actors with electric chemistry on-screen together. Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer share a delightful dynamic that keeps this series more than watchable.
Prime Video wasted no time cancelling the show; it premiered its first season in July, and Amazon cancelled it in September. It’s a shame, because Ride or Die struck a nice balance between action and comedy.
Batman: Caped Crusader
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A couple of years before Spider-Noir reimagined the Spider-Man mythos as a 1940s detective noir, Batman: Caped Crusader did the same thing for the Bat. Caped Crusader is a period piece planting Bruce Wayne in a post-war Gotham, mostly adapting Batman comics that were actually published in the ’40s.
Batman originated in the era of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, when hard-boiled Bogart mysteries dominated multiplexes, but the character has evolved over the years. Caped Crusader undoes all the modernization that Christopher Nolan and Matt Reeves’ movies brought to the character, and takes him back to his old-school detective-noir roots.
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The ending of Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation has proven to be divisive, to say the least. The denouement of Carrie is one of the most seminal final acts in the history of horror fiction — it’s the perfect intersection of terror and tragedy — and no previous adaptation has dared to mess with it, but Flanagan flagrantly rewrote that ending to have Carrie White recruited by the telekinetic Avengers.
That finale has been understandably polarizing, but every episode up to that point was both a spot-on translation of the story as written, and a curious contemporization of that classic tale. From the school shooting drill to the CarrieRed cyberbullying to far-right influencer Margaret White, Flanagan’s Carrie updated all the pieces of the novel for the roaring 2020s.
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It’s nearly impossible to successfully adapt a video game for the screen, but it’s especially difficult for a game like Fallout. Whereas The Last of Us games tell a single story on straight rails, the Fallout games give the player a lot of leeway to figure out the story for themselves. The main character is just a faceless avatar for the player to project their own personality onto, and the direction of the plot depends on their individual choices.
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy had their work cut out for them turning Fallout into a prestige TV drama (a challenge they’d previously faced when they turned Westworld into a prestige TV drama), but they figured out the perfect approach. Their Fallout TV series folds all the different Fallout experiences together in a sprawling, multi-perspective drama switching between a few different protagonists, each representing a different corner of the Fallout universe.
Spider-Noir
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When Amazon announced a full live-action TV series revolving around Nicolas Cage’s 1930s P.I.-style Spider-Man from the animated Spider-Verse movies, the overriding question was: who asked for this? That character provided some fun comic relief in those films, but could he really sustain a whole TV show of his own? Did he really need one? But those naysayers said the very same thing when DC gave Peacemaker his own series, and Lucasfilm gave Cassian Andor his own series, and in all three cases, it turned out awesome.
While the concept seemed gimmicky and one-note at first, the filmmakers found plenty of gas in that tank. Spider-Noir satisfies as both an oddball superhero actioner and a hard-boiled ’30s detective noir, and Cage gives one of the best performances of his career as this jaded Jake Gittes-esque private eye who reluctantly resumes his superheroing career and gets his groove back.
I’m A Virgo
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Over the past decade, musician and activist Boots Riley has earned a formidable reputation as one of cinema’s greatest satirists. In between his two gonzo anti-capitalist feature films, Sorry to Bother You and I Love Boosters, Riley created the hugely underrated TV series I’m a Virgo.
I’m a Virgo is a surrealist dramedy looking at life in Oakland through the eyes of a 13-foot-tall teenage giant. The forced-perspective tricks that the series used to show Cootie’s height are truly impressive — you’ll wonder how they pulled it off — and, in its own oddball kind of way, the story as a whole examines what it means to be an outsider, and how to connect with other people when you don’t fit in.
Sterling Point
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After starting out playing supporting roles in teen dramas, Megan Park shifted into independent filmmaking so she could tell her own coming-of-age stories in The Fallout and My Old Ass. Then, she shifted once again to television, and created a drama series for Amazon Prime. Sterling Point is dressed up in the same vein as shows like Off Campus and The Summer I Turned Pretty, but it’s actually good.
Sterling Point strikes the perfect balance between evoking early-oughts nostalgia and touching on issues that are affecting today’s youth of Gens Z and Alpha. It solidifies Park as one of the best storytellers out there for young people.
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Spinoffs are usually a recipe for diminishing returns, but Neagley is a rare exception; it might even be a stronger show than Reacher itself. It’s certainly a lot weirder and darker, with its cult storyline, and it actually has some character development. Reacher famously never changes, but the titular hero of Neagley actually evolves; the first season was all about Frances overcoming the haphephobia she’s suffered from since childhood.
Neagley had everything we’ve come to expect from a season of Reacher: a badass hero fighting for justice, a shocking death that makes the stakes personal, a ragtag band of supporting players, a sinister big bad, and a widespread conspiracy to uncover. But it also went a lot deeper than the average Reacher season, emotionally and thematically.
Prime Video has been killing it with their original shows lately. Even their spinoff of an action show that avoids character development turned out great.
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