The Best Prime Video Original TV Shows

The Rig

Environmental catastrophe may be the most urgent issue of our times, but it’s one that’s famously hard to get people to pay attention to. The Rig’s approach is to repackage the threat as a paranoid virus thriller: The Andromeda Strain meets The Thing… on an oil rig! When Scotland’s Kinloch Bravo oil platform is surrounded by a mystery fog that cuts it off from the rest of the world, the crew start to suspect that Something Weird Is Going On. They’re not wrong, and over six episodes, the magnitude of what’s attacking them becomes clear.

There’s a 90s vibe to The Rig, which offers nostalgia to anybody who misses TV before the days of prestige drama. Playing out like a Doctor Who episode without the TARDIS, it’s also filled with familiar screen faces from Iain Glen, Mark Bonnar, Owen Teale and Mark Addy, to Line of Duty’s Martin Compston and Rochenda Sandall, and Schitt’s Creek’s Emily Hampshire. Already renewed for a second season, expect this sci-fi mystery with a message to return in 2024. LM

Reacher

Reacher is part mystery, part romance, and part Alan Ritchson beating the crap out of a bunch of dudes – what more could you ask for in a TV show? Ritchson plays the titular Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who spends his days roaming the country and doing his best to enjoy life and keep a low profile. That is, until he’s arrested for murder in the small town of Margrave, Georgia. Framed for a crime he didn’t commit, Reacher is forced to use both his brain and his fists to uncover the truth and clear his name. With the help of Detective Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) and Officer Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald), he discovers a criminal conspiracy that runs deep within Margrave and its police department that is far greater than just one murder.

Mr. Robot

Created by: Sam Esmail
Stars: Rami Malek, Christian Slater, Portia Doubleday, Carly Chaikin
Original Network: USA

Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson (Emmy winner Rami Malek) remains one of the most seductive characters on television. To set an hour-long drama more or less inside its own protagonist’s head is a bold gambit, and Elliot, his philosophical narration roiling beneath his placid surface, is a convincing guide through creator Sam Esmail’s tumult of hallucinations, memories, delusions, and dreams. If the draw in Season 1 was its (rarely seen on TV) anti-capitalism, Season 2 witnesses Mr. Robot emerge as a claustrophobic portrait of a young man’s psychological extremes, and that it works at all is thanks mostly to our desire to understand the cryptic, complicated, always compelling Elliot.

Beginning its fourth and final season with some big shifts for its characters (including at least one shocking death), Mr. Robot remained awe-inspiring for the ways in which it plays with the concept of what you can do on television. Few shows have ever delivered the same level of creative spark on a weekly basis, but that’s because Sam Esmail is only one man; the creator and auteur has truly made his mark on the TV landscape with each inventive choice. The season continues to focus on the increased threat presented by the mysterious Whiterose (B.D. Wong) and Elliot’s (Rami Malek) efforts to take her down, was a strong opening that delivered a few major twists. It’s all-consuming television that never takes its foot off the accelerator, except for the occasional moment of grieving that reminds us that these characters might be caught up in a crazy global conspiracy, but that doesn’t make them any less human.

Dead Ringers 

Rachel Weisz stars opposite Rachel Weisz in this adaptation of David Cronenberg’s classic body horror, which starred two Jeremy Ironses. It shouldn’t work, but it really really does. The Rachels play twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle who are doing groundbreaking work in the field of fertility treatment. The twins look identical, but personality-wise are not – Elliot is confident, headstrong, a thrill seeker, while Beverly is nurturing and shy. When the pair secures funding for an experimental new clinic, they are flying high but Elliot could jeopardize it all… Dealing with big issues about women’s bodies this is an intense, bloody and very intelligent show featuring career best turns from Weisz. It’s also only six episodes and doesn’t lend itself to a second season. Binge the lot in a day and then let it live with you for weeks.

Fleabag (2016)

Synopsis: A dry-witted woman, known only as Fleabag, has no filter as she navigates life and love in London while trying… [More]
Starring: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ben Aldridge, Sian Clifford, Bill Paterson

Too Old to Die Young

It’s hard to say what was going on behind the scenes during the making of Too Old to Die Young. Perhaps we’ll hear all about it in a tell-all autobiography one day, but for now it remains one of Prime’s most exceptional curios, having been filmed over the better part of a year in the late ’10s by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives). Why it was all but buried by the streamer upon release, we may never know, but it looks like Amazon learned an unfortunate lesson about giving auteur filmmakers full creative control that day.

Having written the bulk of the show with beloved comic book writer Ed Brubaker, Refn crafted a grim, violent, and nausea-inducing tale of Cop vs Killer here that gives you almost no one to sympathize with. Slick, slow, and swamped in neon, it’s everything you’d expect a TV series from Refn to be, and it will push you to your limits, with its painstaking vibes falling somewhere between the infamous floor sweeping sequence in Twin Peaks: The Return and a cut scene from Grand Theft Auto. A genuine masterpiece for (maybe) ten people. One of them could be you!

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