An Amazon Prime subscription comes with quite a couple of perks, such as access to thousands of movies and TV shows accessible for streaming on Prime Video. That consists of a number of Amazon Prime originals that are only accessible on the service. Traversing Amazon Prime Video’s television series library can be nerve-wracking, principally when it comes to finding the good stuff. To make your exploration a bit easier, we have put together a list of our favorite original series accessible on the streaming platform.
1. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: 3 seasons, 26 episodes | IMDb: 8.8/10
This series centers on a lady in New York City in the late 1950s, who plans to become a stand-up comedian after her husband leaves her. Amy Sherman-Palladino’s follow-up to Gilmore Girls and Bunheads might be the most impactful Amazon series since Transparent, and it has got the Emmys to prove it. It is an excellent, quick-witted, crowd-pleaser, a high-spirited fast-talking comedy with some heaviness. Set in 1950s New York City, Rachel Brosnahan (House of Cards, Manhattan) plays Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel, the picture-perfect, upper Westside wife who — after her husband leaves her — goes on a binge and finds herself on stage delivering a comical, profanity-fueled set in a rundown junkyard of a club. The club’s booker, Susie Meyerson (Alex Borstein), takes an instantaneous interest in her, so while her home life is tumbling apart, Miriam finds herself trying to form a career as a stand-up comic in an era when ladies weren’t just welcomed on that scene. It is an incredible series that mixes comedy, feminism and a little bit of stand-up history into an amusing potion of laughs, heart and an amazing lead performance from Brosnahan, who will eventually be remembered for this role the same way Lauren Graham will always be reminisced for Lorelai Gilmore.
2. Patriot: 2 seasons, 18 episodes | IMDb: 8.3/10
Patriot is a tough show to describe as it is so much more than the sum of its parts. It is about a man named John Tavner (Michael Dorman), an N.O.C. (Non-official cover) for the CIA. His cover is as an engineer for a pipe firm, a job for which he has little edification or experience, and yet, it is also a job he must uphold so as to complete his mission: To get a bag of money from point A to point B, which just ensues to be what his job in pipe involves: To build a pipe to get a thing from Point A to Point B. But if it were that easy, neither an engineer (in the piping context) nor a CIA agent (in the context of the bag of money) would be needed. Patriot is about the difficulties that ascend along the way. There are misfortunes; a murder examination; and human nature and Tavner’s relations with his brother, with co-workers, and with his father get in the way. After every episode, the intensity of this mission upsurges. The burden gets weightier. By the end, viewers will be left desperate to find a security valve to unbridle some pressure as Patriot does a number on its audience. It is a pitch-black comedy and it is not for everybody. Season 2 is just as outlandish and silly as ever, but unluckily, the show has bit the dust.
3. Fleabag: 2 seasons, 12 episodes | IMDb: 8.7/10
Not exactly an Amazon Original, Fleabag was co-produced by Amazon and England’s BBC Three. Set in London, it stars the splendid Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who also produced the show) as a young lady endeavoring to sail across modern life in London. That description barely does the series justice, however. It is a hysterical, dirty, sexually scheming and shockingly thoughtful meditation on grief and aloneness that goes by so rapidly (there are only six half-hour episodes in each season) that viewers will desire they relished it more before it ends. Fleabag is a swift series to binge, but it packs a colossal quantity of comedy and pain into its short runtime, examining beneath the dating life of a sexual thrill-seeking twenty-something only to reveal drabness and tragedy. There is a gut punch around every angle, but Fleabag always manages to lift itself out of its depths to make us giggle again. It is really one of the most unique, original comedies of the last some years.
4. Good Omens: 1 season, 6 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10
David Tennant and Michael Sheen star in this hellishly fun version of Neil Gaiman’s beloved work of fantasy. Tennant plays Crowley, a demon who’s spent the past 6,000 years living life as a type of rockstar on Earth. Sheen plays his saintly counterpart, Aziraphale, a lumbering angel who also calls Earth home and as an unwilling friendship with his immortal enemy. The two must group together to inhibit the Anti-Christ – a kid in Oxford shire – from mounting to power, terminating the world, and, most prominently, Crowley’s best of Queen mixtape.
5. The Man in the High Castle: 4 seasons, 40 episodes | IMDb: 8.1/10
Slackly based on Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name (it also bears some semblance to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America), The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternate, dystopian world where Germany won World War II. Essentially, the East Coast is occupied by the Germans, and the West Coast is occupied by the Japanese, and there is a no man’s land in between. Exec-produced by Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files), the series sees numerous characters working to create a resistance against their profession by collecting “forbidden newsreels” that show the alternative history in which the Allies won the war in an effort to divulge a bigger truth about how the world should be. A dark exploration of what it means to be American, The Man in the High Castle is a well-acted, tense and often violent dystopian thriller with lots of twists and turns to keep viewers fathoming.
