Amazon’s Prime Video Has Become the Premier Destination for TV’s Best Action Shows

In the 2010s, Cinemax was the undisputed home of the best action shows on TV. From the globe-trotting Strike Back and martial arts-themed Warrior to the pulpy and violent Banshee and the slick and stylish Jett, the network knew its audience, and knew how to entertain its audience. No one else in the TV space was delivering these types of thrills week in and week out, so when then-parent company WarnerMedia (now Warner Bros. Discovery) shuttered Cinemax’s original programming arm to focus on its streaming service, fans of these types of shows were left without an obvious replacement. That is, until Amazon—still seeking its own identity and a way to compete with the all-powerful Netflix in the so-called streaming wars—realized there was an underserved audience waiting for someone else to step up. Today, the company’s Prime Video platform is home to some of the best and most popular action shows on TV. But what’s special about Amazon becoming the premier destination for action on the small screen is the variety of shows being offered.

When talking about action, one likely thinks of big-budget movies with massive set pieces. They think big explosions, well-choreographed fights, and relentless visual effects. Some might think of John Wick, Die Hard, or Marvel’s superhero films, while others may think of Michael Bay, Tom Cruise, or the Fast and the Furious franchise. What one quickly notices is that few think of episodic television. And yet, Prime Video offers many viewing options for action fans that deliver similar excitement on a weekly basis.

Jack Ryan, which ran from 2018 to 2023 and is based on the character created by Tom Clancy, is a traditional political action thriller. Hanna, which is an adaptation of the 2011 film of the same name, is a character-driven story about a teen raised in the wilderness and trained to be an assassin who begins to find herself after she’s thrust into civilization. Elsewhere, the anti-superhero comic book series The Boys is Amazon’s satirical answer to Marvel and DC, delivering exciting, shocking, and often darkly funny action sequences, while Reacher, which follows the character from Lee Child’s series of novels, is more of a straight-forward action show infused with well-timed comedy and an excellent soundtrack. But that’s not even all the streaming service has to offer. Chris Pratt’s conspiracy-driven drama The Terminal List, while darker and more bloody than some of Prime Video’s other shows, is one of its most popular programs, and the Russos’ Citadel changes things up by adding sexy spies to the mix. And then there is the upcoming series Mr. and Mrs. Smith, an adaptation of the 2005 movie of the same name that mixes action, comedy, and romance to attract yet another subset of viewers. That’s not to mention the platform’s animated offerings that dabble in the genre like Invincible and The Legend of Vox Machina. 

Each of these shows is different in style, story, and approach, but they all deliver on the familiar promises of the genre, featuring adrenaline-fueled action and fight sequences previously reserved more for the big screen. However, it’s not necessarily the number of shows doing this episodically that’s impressive, it’s that the shows are coming from Amazon. The company has found its niche, but to understand why this matters, one must first understand everything that came before, because the originals that populated the service in the early days look nothing like the shows that dominate it now, both in terms of quality and substance.

Amazon debuted its first original series in 2013, but in order to better compete with Netflix, which began developing original content for its streaming library as early as 2011, the company took a democratic approach to content creation, allowing the viewing public to vote on and leave feedback for its pilots. The practice, which continued until 2018, didn’t necessarily determine which projects moved forward on Prime Video, but it allowed the company to gather insights into what its audience liked and didn’t like. And yet, Amazon had few true successes during this time period. Its library is full of forgettable and/or mediocre shows, from Alpha House to Z: The Beginning of Everything. Over the years, only a few programs managed to resonate.

Mozart in the Jungle and Transparent, both of which debuted in 2014, received awards attention early on, but they didn’t hit with mainstream audiences. Meanwhile, 2015’s Bosch connected with viewers, but isn’t what one would describe as prestige. And then there were shows like Patriot, a darkly funny spy series about an intelligence officer on the brink posing as an industrial engineer to stop nuclear war. It might be the best show only TV critics have seen. Amazon tried everything from period dramas and alternate histories to teen comedies and horror, all with varying levels of success. It wasn’t until 2017’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, from the mind of Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino, that a Prime Video series did it all, succeeding on both a critical and commercial level, winning major awards and connecting with viewers. And yet, despite this, Amazon still remained a bit all over the place until the end of the decade. 

The shift away from the practice of throwing darts at the wall arguably began with Bosch, a crime drama set in Los Angeles following a police detective that appears in books by author Michael Connelly. It became one of Prime Video’s most successful shows, running for seven seasons before launching a spin-off, Bosch: Legacy, in 2022. Nearly every one of Amazon’s top shows in the years since its debut has followed a similar path from page to screen, from Jack Ryan to The Terminal List, and wouldn’t you know it, most fall under the action category.

Jack Ryan, which debuted in 2018 to largely positive reviews, was the first of the platform’s high-octane series. It stars John Krasinski as the eponymous CIA analyst who finds himself pulled into the field after identifying a new player in the Middle East by tracking monetary transactions. Confident and familiar, the show is at its best when Ryan gets out from behind his desk, when fists are flying and bullets are whizzing by. It’s your prototypical action series, criss-crossing the globe as it takes viewers from Syria to Russia to Venezuela. For comparison’s sake, it slips easily into the void left by Strike Back, a military-adjacent Cinemax drama following a highly trained special unit tasked with dispatching terrorists around the world. 

But if Jack Ryan is Amazon’s answer to Strike Back, Reacher is a more restrained version of Banshee, the network’s pulpy drama that follows an ex-con who takes on the identity of a Pennsylvania sheriff following his release from prison and begins exacting his own style of justice. The show was known for pulse-pounding action and a compelling central arc that revealed deeper narrative ambitions than simply dropping its lead into different situations and asking him to punch his way out. Reacher, which debuted in 2022 and was Prime Video’s top title in terms of viewers in 2023, similarly succeeds on the back of its leading man, Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher, who in his former life was military police but is now a self-proclaimed hobo who travels the country with nothing but a toothbrush and the clothes on his back. Like Banshee’s Lucas Hood, he too delivers justice with his fists and via his own code of ethics. The first season tackled crime and corruption in small-town Georgia, while the just-completed second season moved the action to New York and followed Reacher’s old army unit as they investigated the murder of their former colleagues. Comedy also plays a big role in the show, balancing the narrative’s more intense action scenes and personal drama with moments of much-needed levity. But while Banshee only operated at one level (11), Reacher dials it back to a more moderate six or seven.

Premiering between Jack Ryan and Reacher was 2019’s breakout hit The Boys. Based on a comic book co-created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the satirical superhero series follows a team of vigilantes as they attempt to take down superheroes, or supes, who’ve been commercialized by a massive corporation and are never held accountable for their actions. Adapted for TV by Supernatural‘s Eric Kripke and coincidentally starring Banshee‘s Antony Starr as the sociopathic superhero Homelander, the series is darkly funny, bold in its storytelling, and is responsible for some of TV’s most outrageous moments. It brings style and flair to the increasingly familiar action that tends to saturate superhero films, and the show only seems to get bigger and better the longer it goes on.

Of course, not every one of Prime Video’s action offerings is created equal (few people likely know Hanna existed let alone ran for three seasons), but even when critics and viewers don’t align, Amazon’s recent action shows can’t be deemed failures. Although reviewers and U.S. audiences hated and/or ignored the ludicrously expensive 2023 spy drama Citadel starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, the show was reportedly Prime Video’s “second most-watched new original series” internationally, and the “fourth most-watched worldwide.” And then there is 2022’s The Terminal List. Based on the 2018 book of the same name by Jack Carr, the show stars Chris Pratt as James Reece, a Navy SEAL whose unit is ambushed during a covert operation overseas. When he returns home, he discovers the operation was a setup and part of a far-reaching conspiracy, sending him down a blood-thirsty path of revenge. Grim-dark and driven by its lead’s misery, the show was panned by critics; however, it quickly climbed to the top of Nielsen’s streaming chart, proving to be yet another massive success for Amazon.

This isn’t exactly novel, this idea that TV critics and viewers disagree on a show’s merits; plenty of popular projects don’t play well for critics, while many more are acclaimed but fail to find an audience. I can’t say the former happens more for action than other genres, but it sometimes feels like there is a different set of rules for these types of projects. Fans can overlook weak writing if the action is exciting and propulsive enough to keep things moving. And they can ignore pretty much anything, including logic, if the story itself is fun and the characters are enjoyable. That’s why it’s so rewarding when a show like Reacher comes along and is the complete package, delivering an engaging narrative and slick fight sequences on a weekly basis. 

But perhaps what is most remarkable about many of Prime Video’s action series is that, while they’re often described and marketed as “Dad Shows,” they are actually appealing to viewers of all types. Sure, men might be the target audience for many of them, what with the repeating themes of the military, violence, honor, and vengeance, but it’s insulting to think only men connect with these ideas. Action is palatable to the masses, though it obviously helps that many of these shows don’t limit themselves to being just one thing. They often mix genres or are part of subgenres; feature women who are active participants with agency of their own, thereby subverting narrow-minded stereotypes; and include complex, serialized character arcs that provide plenty of support for the action. All of these things help the shows reach a wider audience. But it’s also true that women love brutal fist fights and watching shit explode as much as men do. 

With new seasons of The Boys, its collegiate spinoff Gen V, Reacher, and The Terminal List already planned, and with new programming like Mr. And Mrs. Smith coming soon (all eight episodes debut February 2nd), Amazon thankfully doesn’t look to be hitting the brakes on the action front any time soon. And why would it? As long as there are bad guys to punch and things to blow up, there will always be an audience for action and its connected genres. And while other streaming services and networks might offer up some impressive projects of their own now and then, Amazon has seemingly cornered the market on the genre over the last five years in the wake of Cinemax’s untimely demise. So while it may have taken a long time for Prime Video to get to this point, now that it has, you’d have to be a fool to try and stop ‘em.

Kaitlin Thomas is an entertainment journalist and TV critic. Her work has appeared in TV Guide, Salon, Gold Derby, and TV.com, among other places. You can find her tweets about TV, sports, and Walton Goggins @thekaitling.

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