In addition to offering their paid Prime Video service, Amazon is also in the FAST (free, ad-supported streaming television) business with their free, ad-based platform, Amazon Freevee (née IMDb TV). FAST is on the rise, considering how each stream becomes profitable in comparison to the subscription model, but in comparison to its competition, Freevee seems like the most positive path forward in the newly-evolving FAST expansion. Boasting a stacked library of original series alongside some classic series, Freevee scored its first break-out hit with original series Jury Duty earlier this year (it’s even been nominated for an Emmy!), and shows no signs of slowing down. With so many options, Freevee’s originals and classic offerings are worth sticking out the ads for. And if you are more in the mood for a movie, Freevee has a wide selection for browsing as well.
While an Amazon account is required to view, no purchase is necessary to discover the wonders that Freevee has to offer—reachable through their website or their app, which is available on iOS, Android, and most smart TV devices. And if you’re already a Prime subscriber, Freevee can be easily found nested within the Prime Video app. Below, we have gathered the best shows to watch on Freevee, originals and syndicated series alike (and in no particular order), that you can watch for totally free.
Pretty Hard Cases
Starring Adrienne C. Moore (Orange is the New Black) and Meredith MacNeill (Baroness Von Sketchshow) as a comically mismatched pair of Toronto detectives—one irons her t-shirts! one wears mismatched socks!!—who are obliged to team up to take down a local opioid operation, Canadian import Pretty Hard Cases (née Lady Dicks) is, as one might expect with leads like Moore and MacNeill, extremely funny. I mean, there’s a reason the Odd Couple dynamic (especially in detective shows) is such a classic. And letting both halves of that dynamic be steered by women? You love to see it.
The strength of its explicitly diverse core cast, which includes both Hollywood vets like Karen Robinson (Schitt’s Creek) and Tara Strong (literally any cartoon you’ve ever watched) and Canadian stalwarts Al Mukadam, Daren A. Herbert and Dean McDermott, certainly helped. But ultimately it was the fact that series creators Tassie Cameron and Sherry White, who had just finished writing the first season when COVID locked the industry down in the spring of 2020, watched what happened with George Floyd and summer of reckoning that followed and took the same considered step back as B99 did, scrapping whole scenes and rewriting storylines to better address the rot of police brutality and systemic racism at the heart of North American-style policing.
The result? A complex, thoughtful (and still funny!) story that—though its moments of progressive catharsis do occasionally ring too much of fantasy to be satisfying—doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. A diverse police force helps, the series suggests, but it can’t solve everything. Letting women have institutional power helps, too, it argues, but it won’t fix what’s broken within that same institution’s basic structure. Because at the end of the day (tiny spoiler to follow), all you really need to get out of the kind of trouble that would derail pretty much any young, Black life is to be a white boy with ties to literally anyone in power. It’s infuriating. But at least Pretty Hard Cases understands why, and seems prepared to address it. —Alexis Gunderson
Numbers
I watched Numbers almost exclusively through reruns on the ION channel, and every episode was a genuine delight. When FBI agent Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) is faced with a puzzling case, he calls in the help of his genius mathematician brother Charlie (David Krumholtz). By using various mathematical means and the help of his colleges at the fictional California Institute of Science, Charlie is able to parse out the means, motives, and moves of the criminals at the center of these various crimes. The series ran for six seasons on CBS before being canceled, but its time on the air allowed it to creatively blend one man’s brilliant mind with the FBI strategies of his brother, all while their father attempts to keep the peace between them. It’s a unique series that puts another interesting spin on the typical procedural structure, bringing a brainy dorkiness to a subgenre filled with smooth charm. —Anna Govert
Alias
Premiering at the end of September 2001, ABC’s spy series Alias hit at a time when American enthusiasm for national security workers could not be higher. Centered around secret agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), who was recruited out of college to join a covert branch of the CIA, the thrilling series spent its first couple seasons serving up delicious twists like soft serve ice cream, starting with the jaw-dropper that Sydney was actually not working for the CIA like she thought, but for a terrorist organization called SD-6. In just the pilot episode, we learned that Sydney and her coworkers were unwitting participants in a massive conspiracy to take over the world—and that her father, Jack (Victor Garber), who she’d thought sold airplane parts, was actually a high-ranking SD-6 official.
Enter Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan), an actual CIA agent who, after telling Sydney the truth about her job, recruits her to work as a double agent to report on SD-6 to the U.S. government. Vaughn serves as her handler, assigning her objectives and serving as the voice in her ear when she’s out on her dramatic, high-stakes missions (always under an alter ego, hence the name of the show). —Lauren Thoman
The Twilight Zone (1959 and 2019)
It is, in the estimation of any sane person, one of the greatest science fiction series of all time without a doubt, with its myriad episodes about technology, aliens, space travel, etc. But The Twilight Zone also plumbed the depths of the human psyche, madness and damnation with great regularity, in the same spirit as creator Rod Serling’s later series, Night Gallery. Ultimately, The Twilight Zone is indispensable to both sci-fi and horror. Its moralistic playlets so often have the tone of dark, Grimm Brothers fables for the rocket age of the ‘50s and ‘60s, urban legends that have left an indelible mark on the macabre side of our pop culture consciousness. What else can one call an episode such as “Living Doll,” wherein a confounded, asshole Telly Savalas is threatened, stalked and ultimately killed by his abused daughter’s vindictive doll, Talky Tina? Or “The Invaders,” about a lonely woman in a farmhouse who is menaced by invaders from outer space in an episode almost entirely without dialog? Taken on its own, a piece of television such as “The Invaders” almost shares more in common with “old dark house” horror films or the slashers that would arrive 20 years later than an entry in a sci-fi anthology. —Jim Vorel
Leverage and Leverage: Redemption
The original Leverage, which ran for five seasons on TNT, followed a group of thieving masterminds who became modern-day Robin Hoods by pulling elaborate scams on rich, greedy, and corrupt people in order to give that money to those in need. Led by former insurance investigator Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton) and joined by “The Grifter” Sophie (Gina Bellman), “The Hacker” Alex (Aldis Hodge), “The Hitter” Eliot (Christian Kane), and “The Thief” Parker (Beth Riesgraf), each episode would follow a fun “con-of-the-week” format that (along with its well-rounded characters and witty writing) catapulted it to cult status. Leverage: Redemption, Freevee’s 2021 revival series, picks up a year after Nate’s death, as Sophie brings the band back together to do some more good for the world. Like most revivals, the series doesn’t fully capture the charm of the original, but it is still a hell of a good time. —Anna Govert
Sprung
After finding themselves released early from their sentences in the first few weeks of pandemic for “health and safety” reasons—an official action which amounts to more or less shoving half of the (conveniently co-ed) prison’s population through the front gates with nothing more than a “good luck!” and the clothes they came in with—a trio of non-violent offenders (Garret Dillahunt, Shakira Barrera, and Phillip Garcia) in rural Western Maryland end up banding together. First it’s to find a safe spot to “shelter in place” during lockdown, then it’s to take advantage of COVID chaos by doing enough crime that they can support themselves in a job market hostile to anyone with a criminal record. If this sounds like a tough nut to crack jokes from, well, you’re not wrong! But with Greg Garcia—the mind behind My Name is Earl, Raising Hope and The Guest Book—leading Sprung’s creative vision as creator, director, and primary writer, the fact that the limited Freevee comedy series ends up threading the absurdly dark/warmly funny needle isn’t surprising. —Alexis Gunderson
Lost
When J.J. Abrams first marooned his plane-crash survivors on a remote island, no one realized the show’s name was a double entendre: It took crowd-sourced blogs to make sense of all the hidden clues, relevant connections, time shifts and intertwined storylines, and each season gave us far more questions than answers. But there’s something refreshing about a network TV show that trusts the mental rigor of its audience instead of dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator. Even given the highly divisive series finale that had to make sense of the series’ lore in a way that connected to its exceptional character relationships, sometimes it’s good to be a little lost. —Josh Jackson
Primo
Freevee’s original comedy Primo, the semi-autobiographical TV series created by writer Shea Serrano and co-produced by Mike Schur (of Parks and Recreation and The Good Place fame), is a genuine delight. The comedy centers on the life of 16-year-old Rafa, nicknamed Primo, a Mexican-American growing up with a single mom and five crazy uncles in San Antonio. The show is funny, heartfelt, and loaded with complex and interesting characters. The series, which consists of 8 half-hour episodes, is a quick binge, but guaranteed to provide laughs alongside its heartwarming moments. —Terry Terrones and Anna Govert
Bosch: Legacy
When Prime Video’s Bosch took its final bow back in 2021, it did so as the streamer’s longest running Original series. Seven seasons! In streaming years, that’s nearly a full Supernatural. And yet, even fitting that much story under their belt, the show’s creative team hadn’t even come close to matching either the length or breadth of Michael Connelly’s source material. And so, following Harry Bosch’s move to the private sector at the end of the flagship Bosch, Eric Overmeyer, Tom Bernardo, and Connelly, himself, moved over to Freevee and developed Bosch: Legacy, a project that is less “spin-off” than it is only slightly evolved continuation—down, even, to the moody, kaleidoscopic title sequence. Starring Titus Welliver as Bosch (now a private detective), Madison Lintz as his daughter, Maddie (now, confoundingly, a rookie LAPD officer), and Mimi Rogers as Honey Chandler (still a lawyer, but on the hunt for revenge)—all three reprising their roles from the original—Legacy picks up literally where Bosch left off. And while Freevee’s commercial format forces a more action-movie rhythm than feels natural for a Bosch project, the joy of being able to watch Harry Bosch stick screws into the corrupt heart of the LAPD is worth the trade-off. —Alexis Gunderson
Hell on Wheels
Like Rectify, Hell on Wheels’ availability on Netflix gave it a fighting chance at wider, belated recognition. Not that it’s at Rectify’s level, or even in its time period. But this Western—which dramatized the lives of real and fictional players during the construction of competing, cross-country railroads after the Civil War—was never less than a richly sourced imagining of our nation’s great expansion West, with a few can’t-miss psychopaths and tortured heroes for good measure. Its final season never relented until the final spike was driven into the last slat of Union Pacific track, detouring only to resolve long-standing conflicts and foreshadow the challenges America was then readying to stare down. Anson Mount, as Civil War vet-turned-vengeful gunslinger-turned unlikely tycoon Cullen Bohannon, carried the final episodes through their bloody, heat-stroked twists and turns. And there may never be as resilient and nightmarish a mortal villain as Christopher Heyerdahl’s Thor Gundersen. Just don’t call him The Swede. —Kenny Herzog
Jury Duty
At the heart of Freevee’s Jury Duty is a good man, and that man’s name is Ronald Gladden. Ronald is the only non-actor participating in what he truly believes is a very real stint performing his civic duty in what he believes is a real court case. Unfolding in cringe-worthy hilarity, Jury Duty pushes its actors (including James Marsden as himself) and Ronald to the brink in order to complete a once-in-a-lifetime TV experiment. And largely, that experiment has paid off, with the series receiving a number of Emmy nominations, including an acting nomination for Marsden. No matter how you feel about its sometimes questionable ethics, Jury Duty is Freevee’s biggest break-out hit to date, and a series that finally put them on the streaming map. —Anna Govert
Weeds
Before Walter White broke bad or Piper Chapman started selling panties, Weeds introduced us to the privileged protagonist who resorts to crime when faced with dire circumstances. In this case, meet Mary Louise Parker’s Nancy Botwin, a suburban mom-turned-marijuana dealer desperate to keep her family afloat after her husband dies of a heart attack. As with so many Showtime series, Jenji Kohan’s precursor to Orange Is the New Black skidded out of control as Nancy sunk deeper and deeper into the black market, but in its first season especially, Weeds offered a ballsy, bawdy send-up of conformist thinking and the American Dream, aided by gonzo comic support from Justin Kirk, Kevin Nealon, and the deliciously petty Elizabeth Perkins. Plus, its title sequence, featuring Malvina Reynolds’ 1962 ditty “Little Boxes,” is one of premium cable’s most memorable. —Matt Brennan
Alex Rider
This newest take on Alex Rider is something entirely different. More of a piece with what teen TV has become in in the last decade—slick, serious, cinematic and mature, with a strong bent towards internationalism and diversity—it’s the kind of spy drama you can recommend indiscriminately to your adult friends. So what if its reluctant spy hero is a teenage boy? The show takes him seriously, which means their fictional version of the SAS takes him seriously, which means the deeply realistic bad guys out to literally kill him also take him seriously. And while that much seriousness has the tendency to drag lesser adult action series to an absolute standstill, the hyper-realistic teen antics Alex and his tiny circle of friends get up to, even in the midst of life-or-death situations, serve as useful tonal ballast that lends the series just enough warmth and humor to bolster the rest of the story’s inherent tension.
That said, there are a few elements of the series that jangle more than they should. Of course, Alex Rider is still a spy drama, and as such is obliged to have its characters make a lot of silly decisions for the sake of plot. But if watching 2020 (and each fresh hell brought on by every following year) torturously unfold has taught me anything, it’s that the existence of rich teen Nazis with a chip on their shoulder and the will to wreck the world ought to be taken much more seriously than any of us might want to believe, and Treadstone-esque Alex Rider gets it. It’s a sophisticated spy thriller custom-made for the Bourne Identity set. —Alexis Gunderson
The Originals
It’s a rare occasion when the spinoff exceeds the original. The history of TV is littered will ill-conceived and poorly executed sequels and for every Frasier and Boston Legal, there are dozens of shows like Joni Loves Chachi, Beverly Hills Buntz, and AfterMASH. Thankfully, The Originals falls firmly into the former camp and is actually a case in which the child has exceeded the achievements of the parent. As fun and compelling as the characters and stories on The Vampire Diaries are, that show took a little too long to really get going and was in a more limiting setting, especially in the first few seasons. The sequel, however, launched with fully-formed characters (with a mythology established by the parent show), unfettered by geometry class or the constraints of a small town. Klaus Mikaelson (Joseph Morgan) is easily one of the most complex anti-heroes on TV and creator Julie Plec is unafraid to poke around in the heads of any character, even killing a few. Also, as dark and disturbing as The Vampire Diaries can be (and it’s gotten more so as the characters age) The Originals blows it out of the water. Plec has expanded on the world she helped create in The Vampire Diaries, giving her characters more room to grow emotionally and significantly more intricate challenges to face. The politics of The Originals is just as fascinating as the supernatural elements and the show feels more fully-formed than The Vampire Diaries did early on. It doesn’t hurt that New Orleans is decidedly more fun to explore than an imaginary small town in Virginia, and as much as I dig the gang from The Vampire Diaries, the rich character palette with which Plec and the writers have to work with here is a cut above. —Mark Rabinowitz
The X-Files
Today, after more than 200 episodes, two feature films, a spinoff and two-plus decades of history, being an X-Files fan is a lot like being a fan of a long-running comic book. Namely, there are peaks and valleys in writing quality, the continuity becomes a convoluted mess if you stop to think about it for even a second and—in spite of whatever monumental changes occur—the story always seems to revert back to a certain status quo. And yet there’s no question that what initially started as creator Chris Carter’s take on Kolchak: The Night Stalker has since become an indelible cornerstone in the history of television. Long before the likes of Buffy or Lost, The X-Files legitimatized the viability of serialized genre storytelling. Alongside stand-alone case episodes, the series incorporated ongoing arcs involving vast government conspiracies, alien invasions and the mystery surrounding a missing loved one. Perhaps more impressive than its long-term thinking, however, was the flexible tone the creative team established as a template for its various installments. Episodes could be scary, funny, surreal, emotional—sometimes all in the same hour.
In the world of The X-Files, a horror-filled hour centered on deformed cannibals could fit right alongside a hilarious take-off on Cops. Writing and directing aside, what really tied everything together and made it pop was the legendary chemistry between David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully. At the risk of courting controversy, those who simply reduce the two’s dynamic to a simple “will they, won’t they?” are being somewhat reductive. What Mulder and Scully had was more than simple sexual tension; it was a loving and respectful partnership between two intelligent individuals whose differing attributes perfectly complemented one another. It assured us that, despite all the monsters and aliens at play, there was an inherent humanity rooted firmly at the show’s center. —Mark Rozeman
High School
Based on the memoir High School and accompanying album Hey, I’m Just Like You by Canadian trailblazers Tegan and Sara Quinn, High School is Amazon Freevee’s latest offering in their burgeoning library of originals. Taking place during Tegan and Sara’s tumultuous high school years, the show follows the twin sisters as they navigate life, sexuality, and music—all while trying to simply get along. Coming from showrunner Clea Duvall (Happiest Season), the series stars TikTokers and actual twin sisters Railey and Seazynn Gilliland as the musicians. This series is perfect for any fan of Tegan and Sara’s decades-long music career, as well as those looking for an intimate examination of teenage girlhood in the mid-90’s. This show is grungy, stylized, and so much more than just a Tegan and Sara biopic. —Anna Govert
The Good Wife
Are network dramas supposed to be this good? Julianna Margulies stars as the title character Alicia Florrick, who (in a storyline ripped from many, many headlines) is subjected to public humiliation when her husband, Peter (Chris Noth), the District Attorney of Chicago, is caught cheating with a prostitute. The scandal forces Alicia back into the workforce, and she takes a job with her (very sexy) old law school friend Will Gardner (Josh Charles). But Alicia is not your typical “stand by your man” woman and The Good Wife is not your typical show. The brilliance of the series is that it deftly blends multiple and equally engaging storylines that both embrace and defy genre conventions. Each episode is an exciting combination of political intrigue, inner-office jockeying, family strife, sizzling romance, and intriguing legal cases. The series features a fantastic array of guest stars, and creates a beguiling and believable world where familiar characters weave in and out of Alicia’s life just like they would in real life: You’ll be fascinated by Archie Panjabi’s mysterious Kalinda Sharma, delighted by Zach Grenier’s mischievous David Lee, marvel at Christine Baranski’s splendid Diane Lockhart. And, witness the transformative performance Alan Cummings gives as the cunning Eli Gold. But the real reason to stick with the series is to partake in the show’s game-changing fifth season. Many series start to fade as they age, but The Good Wife peaked late in its mostly glorious seven season run. —Amy Amatangelo
Schitt’s Creek
The narcissistic matriarch of her spoiled clan, stripped of their fortune and plopped down in the rural burg of Schitt’s Creek, former soap star Moira Rose—as played by Catherine O’Hara, dressed by costume designer Debra Hanson, and written by Schitt’s Creek co-creator Dan Levy and his team—was, for the series’ first two seasons, the main reason to tune in: She’s high camp catnip (“What is your favorite season?” “Awards.”) with a wig collection that qualifies as the best drama on television. And then something happened. Her husband, Johnny (Eugene Levy), once the owner of a successful chain of video stores, rediscovered his purpose running a motel. Moira won a seat on the town council. Their son, David (Dan Levy), opened a store and met the love of his life. Their daughter, Alexis (Annie Murphy), finally finished high school (it’s a long story) and decided to enroll in community college. In Seasons 3, 4, and 5, the Roses put down roots, and as they have, the people of Schitt’s Creek—once treated primarily as rubes, innocently getting in the way of the family’s plans to flee back to their former lives—have learned to wrangle them, in some cases by developing sharper edges of their own. Though it hasn’t lost its absurdist inflection, what began as a fish-out-of-water comedy about a bunch of snobs reduced to eating mozzarella sticks at the Café Tropical has become a gentler, warmer, more complicated tale of what happens when the fish sprout legs, and one of the best comedies on television: Call it the sweetening of Schitt’s Creek. —Matt Brennan
Person of Interest
In many ways, Person of Interest was ahead of its time. Airing on CBS from 2011 to 2016, the series hinged on our now very real, growing fears of AI. Following former CIA agent Reese (Jim Caviezel) and billionare tech genius Finch (Michael Emerson), the two become crime-fighting vigilantes with the help of Finch’s predictive program. Using pattern-recognition, the software scans the denizens of New York City, and attempts to predict crimes before they can be committed. What starts solidly as a case-of-the-week series about two men aiming to utilize controversial technology in service of the greater good becomes a thrilling sci-fi classic over the course of its five-season run. Bolstered by engaging performances by stand-outs Taraji P. Henson (Joss Carter), Sarah Shahi (Shaw), and Amy Acker (Root), alongside Caviezel and Emerson, Person of Interest is a must-watch for any fan of sci-fi or speculative fiction, especially as our world inches eerily closer to matching their tech-influenced reality. —Anna Govert
Fringe
Like Lost, J.J. Abrams’s Fringe starts as a masterful slow-burn. The first season drops copious hints at the show’s central mythology, but doesn’t put all its cards on the table until the end of an unforgettable season finale. Until then, it’s a paranormal procedural in the vein of X-Files; after that point, it’s a tense, unsettling tale of two parallel dimensions at war with one another, sometimes unwittingly. Unlike Lost, Fringe remains well-paced throughout its final four seasons, popular enough to keep getting renewed and finish out its story, but not a Lost-style blockbuster that has to prolong and complicate its story to meet a network’s demand for more content. Fringe wasn’t as powerful or moving as Lost ultimately proved to be, but it was a far more focused and deliberate show, which makes it stronger and more satisfying in many ways. And John Noble’s turn as Walter Bishop, a brilliant scientist struggling with diminished mental faculties and his own guilt over his interactions with the parallel dimension he discovered, is one of the best and most heartbreaking performances in recent TV history. —Garrett Martin
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