New Shows on Amazon Prime
Photos courtesy of Amazon Prime
While Amazon might not have the quantity of new TV series of its competitor Netflix, the online retail giant has invested heavily in its narrower band of original programming. That’s nowhere more apparent than with last month’s launch of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, but it can also be seen in its whole slate of recent releases. Here we’ll keep track of every new series available for Prime members to stream for free, including through partners like Freevee. In the last few months, that’s meant action-adventure, animation, comedy, fantasy and drama. Here are 10 of the biggest new TV shows on Amazon Prime.
1. CitadelRelease Date: April 28, 2023
Creators: Josh Appelbaum, Bryan Oh, David Weil
Stars: Richard Madden, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Stanley Tucci, Olegar Fedoro, Lesley Manville
Genre: Spy thriller
Paste Review Rating: 8.0
Citadel, the new spy fare from David Weil (Hunters) on Prime Video (with the Russo brothers serving as EPs), is completely bereft of pretension and bullshit. This is James Bond, but for TV and with both a male and female Bond, and they absolutely kill it. “Citadel” is the namesake global spy agency at the heart of the drama, and in the opening scene—a train ride through the Italian Alps, of course—we meet Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Mason Kane (Richard Madden), Citadel’s star agents. Bad news follows quickly when it becomes clear that a rival organization, called Manticore, is out to eliminate the entire Citadel organization, and having a pretty successful time of it. A wild shootout ensues, ending in a spectacular derailment, and after a cut to credits, we race ahead eight years to see if the Citadel survivors can somehow get their act together and take a bite out of Manticore, which at this point apparently controls most of the known world. As you can tell from words like “Manticore,” there’s a knowing garishness here, and it works marvelously. Stanley Tucci, who plays the head of Citadel, Bernard Orlick, is laugh-out-loud funny in his matter-of-fact, almost cheery approach to the doomed task of trying to rebuild his group in the face of incredible odds. What we’re dealing with here is pure entertainment, dealt with smartly in a show that doesn’t strive to be especially smart on a global/political scale. —Shane Ryan
2. Dead RingersRelease Date: April 21, 2023
Creator: Alice Birch
Stars: Rachel Weisz, Britne Oldford, Poppy Liu, Jennifer Ehle, Michael Chernus
Genre: Psychological thriller
Paste Review Rating: 8.4
Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers, the second adaptation of Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s novel Twins, bares all. Sharing its name with David Cronenberg’s 1988 iteration, Birch’s take on the haunting story of twin Drs. Mantle is a gripping work of art, beautiful and grotesque at every turn. Rachel Weisz stars in the new Prime Video series as both Elliot and Beverly Mantle, obstetricians determined to redefine women’s reproductive healthcare by whatever means necessary. Driven by obsession and competition, the sisters share every part of their lives—patients and partners included. The show is by no means an easy watch. In the first episode, we’re inundated with brutal sequences of the Mantles’ patients—natural births, cesareans, examinations—all in brief, indelible images. These are very minute parts of the doctors’ lives, just another day in the office. Desensitization is the key to survival, the key to their thriving in such a highly traumatic field. And why are we expected to be so squeamish when it comes to witnessing birth? As the sisters spend the first two episodes seeking out funding from Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle), a mega-millionaire whose obscene family funds come from their essential role in the opioid epidemic, the social and economic realities of our country are unavoidable. The series raises moral and ethical considerations of pregnancy, while still maintaining an objectively pro-choice point of view. It’s a brutal watch—one often that had me reflexively gripping my stomach—but Birch’s Dead Ringers has proven an essential update to the classic Cronenberg film. —Kristen Reid
3. The PowerRelease Date: March 31, 2023
Creators: Raelle Tucker, Naomi Alderman, Claire Wilson, Sarah Quintrell
Stars: Toni Collette, Auliʻi Cravalho, John Leguizamo
Genre: Sci-fi
Paste Review Rating: 6.5
It’s a challenging time to be a woman in America, as a certain segment of the population seems all too eager to roll back the hard-fought gains of the women’s rights movement. Sadly, The Power isn’t quite the show this moment requires. It’s pretty clear that Prime Video was hoping to create something akin to its own version of The Handmaid’s Tale, with its unflinchingly feminist point of view, uber-detailed depictions of oppression and violence, and simmering rage. But while it’s easy to see Margaret Atwood’s influence in Alderman’s original novel, the two television series have little in common, most notably because The Power almost goes out of its way to avoid having to commit to a specific point of view about what sort of story it’s telling. The basic premise of the series is simple: What if, one day, teenage girls all over the world suddenly developed the power to emit electric shocks from their hands, like an electric eel? If those girls could then transfer that same power to older women? If a group that had long been oppressed in many parts of the world suddenly gained the ability to fight back? If women no longer had to be afraid of the threat of physical violence from men? What would the world look like then? The answers to these questions are both varied and complicated, and The Power addresses them through a sprawling story that’s spread across a half dozen major characters and almost as many countries. —Lacy Baugher Milas
4. Daisy Jones & the SixRelease Date: March 3, 2023
Creators: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
Stars: Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Camila Morrone, Suki Waterhouse
Genre: Musical drama
Paste Review Rating: 8.5
In the third episode of Daisy Jones & The Six, during the recording of the band’s first hit single “Look At Us Now (Honeycomb),” you can’t help but feel like you really are watching musical magic happen. Despite Daisy and Billy (Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, a match made in heaven) engaging in songwriting warfare and the rest of the band already getting caught in the crossfire, it truly feels like fictional band Daisy Jones & The Six are something special. Based on the novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and brought to the small screen by co-showrunners Scott Neustadter and Will Graham, Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & The Six catalogs the cosmic collision of homegrown band The Six (which only consists of five members, it’s a thing) and magnetic songwriter Daisy Jones, beginning with the end of the line—in October of 1977, Daisy Jones & The Six played a sold out Soldier Field in Chicago, only to never set foot on stage together again. Rewinding from there to The Six’s humble beginnings, the series follows frontman Billy Dunne, his wife and photographer Camila (Camila Morrone), guitarist Graham (Will Harrison), pianist Karen (Suki Waterhouse), bassist Eddie (Josh Whitehouse), and drummer Warren (Sebastion Chacon) as they follow their dreams all the way out to Los Angeles, where music producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright) links them with Daisy to create one of the most legendary bands of the ‘70s. In a mix of documentary-style interviews and narrative dramatization, Daisy Jones & The Six follows the band as they build themselves from the ground up, only to tear themselves down piece by piece. —Anna Govert