The best shows to watch on Prime Video right now

Is there anything else on streaming as outrageous as this warped, cynical and wildly entertaining anti-superhero series? Every time it reaches a new high (low?) – exploding heads, a shapeshifting superhero having an orgy with himself, literally everything The Deep does – The Boys finds a way to outdo itself. Gleefully lampooning the Marvelverse, MAGA America, corporate culture and toxic fanboys, it’s the perfect antidote to so much in the culture right now. In fact, it’s so good, we’ll even forgive Karl Urban’s cockney geezer accent.

It’s a crying shame that Barry Jenkins’ jaw-dropping adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s alternative American slavery novel didn’t find an audience when it first launched – but there’s still time to put that right. Reimagining the runaway slaves’ real-life escape route north as a subterranean dreamscape, it tells the story of two fleeing Georgia slaves (Thuso Mbedu and Aaron Pierre) over ten mesmerising episodes. The Moonlight director forges an epic tale where the sheer brutality of the Black experience, graceful magical realist touches and a deep humanity make for indelible viewing.

Who said video game adaptations were rubbish? Not when Walton Goggins is in them. The Gog play the noseless Ghoul, a irradiated bounty hunter who prowls the post-nuclear wasteland that is 2296 America, in a sci-fi western that was one of 2024 America’s greatest pop-culture exports. A conspiracy thriller of sorts plays out in this bleached landscape as Ella Purnell’s guileless bunker-dweller goes on a mission to find her abducted dad, while the Ghoul follows his own dark agenda. The show’s weird-cool aesthetic – Mad Men by way of 2000 AD – translates makes Fallout a binge quite unlike anything else here.

Somehow The Boys is not the most juvenile superhero series on Prime Video. That honour goes to its spin-off series: a rowdy, riotous burst of violent mayhem set at the Godolkin University School of Crimefighting, an X-Mansion for budding sociopaths. Here YA superheroes go through their paces en route to graduating into the moral hellscape that is Vought International, suffering through relatable coming-of-age strife. The White Lotus fans should know that Patrick Schwarzenegger is more warped as budding Homelander-to-be, Golden Boy.  

Fantasy is big at Amazon – who’d be surprised to find out that Jeff Bezos is a secret weekend LARP’er? – and while the studio’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s 15-book series  lingers somewhat in the shadows of The Rings of Power, it’s overcome a middling start to build a fanatical following for a reason. Sorcery, sex, monsters and an imperious Rosamund Pike keep the interest levels high across its three seasons. And if you don’t know your Aes Sedai from your Myddraal, don’t fret: the mythology will be familiar to anyone remotely conversant in Tolkien, George RR Martin et al. That’s a compliment, and also not.

That’s ‘Jack Reacher’ to you, punk. An old-fashioned, no-frills action series, it follows the eponymous former military policeman turned drifter (Alan Ritchson, a walking redwood tree of a man), who just wants to wander the country in peace but always seems to come across a ne'er-do-well – or a whole criminal organization full of them – in need of a good headbutting. With hard-hitting fight scenes and a winkingly serious tone, the show is definitively not ‘prestige’, but if they end up making 40 seasons, we’d watch every single one.  

If you found Amy Sherman-Palladino’s machine-gun dialogue overstimulating on Gilmore Girls, then you probably won’t feel terribly different about her follow-up series, but it’s at least more sensible applied to 1960s New York and the world of stand-up comedy. Rachel Brosnahan is a bored housewife who stumbles into an unlikely career as the female Lenny Bruce. Her spunky yet vulnerable performance carries the show as it tracks her personal and professional ups and downs, including an affair with the actual Lenny Bruce, played with great soul by Luke Kirby.

The messy dissolution of Brangelina has forever tainted the 2005 action flick, but truth be told, this serialised reboot is much better than the movie ever was. Donald Glover and Pen15’s Maya Erskine display serious chemistry as spies whose shady bosses place them in a fake relationship that gradually grows more real. Smart and sexy, with a fun ‘mission of the week’ framing, it’s a thrilling good time, and the eventual second season should be appointment viewing. #Gloverskine, right? Right?!   

At approximately a bazillion dollars a season, Amazon is not messing about with a Tolkien adaptation that’s set several eras before the goings-on in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power is another of the streamer’s fantasy epics to start slowly but find new gears in season 2, with Charlie Vickers’ serpentine Sauron beginning to emerge as a TV villain of real substance, and Morfydd Clark’s nimble, flinty Galadriel smiting Orcs in deeply satisfying style. Season 3 will probably cost the GDP of a small nation and should continue to ramp up the spectacle.

‘What if the Nazis won the war?’ isn’t quite the crazy hypothetical it was in 1962, when Philip K Dick wrote the novel that inspired this series. Still, the sight of swastikas flying over the White House and concentration camps in major American cities is pretty jarring. Executive produced by Ridley Scott, Amazon’s first prestige series is a complex thought experiment with a sci-fi twist that grows more dense as it goes along. Stick with it, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a gripping drama eerily prescient of our current political reality.

If you watched the icky 1988 David Cronenberg movie of the same name and somehow felt like you could spend another six hours in that world, well, congrats, sicko. Rachel Weisz is devilishly good pulling double-duty as twin gynecologists who have no qualms violating the Hippocratic Oath when it suits their personal goals. Flipping the gender of its protagonists allows the miniseries to explore issues of motherhood and female identity while retaining the perverse humour of Cronenberg’s original. And Weisz looks great in blood-red scrubs.

No one’s doing it like Boots Riley. Five years after Sorry to Bother You, the rapper-turned-director returned with another singular piece of surrealist satire, a limited series about a sheltered Black kid from Oakland, California… who just so happens to be 13 feet tall. A genuine coming-of-age tale that also contains Riley’s signature capitalist critique and political invective, it’s truly unlike anything on television from the past few years, let alone Prime. Also, it’s got Walton Goggins as a megalomaniacal billionaire superhero. If that doesn’t get you watching, check your pulse.

Dr Who goes Hannibal Lecter in this British psychological thriller. No, Peter Capaldi doesn’t eat anyone, but he’s a frightfully disturbing intellectual presence as a criminal with the apparent ability to see the future. (‘My perception of time is better than anyone’s,’ he says cheekily.) Behind bars when the show starts, he begins aiding a tormented social worker (Jessica Raine) who’s become wrapped up in the search for a missing child. Raine is believably frazzled as a woman plagued by horrifying visions, while Capaldi is just straight-up chilling, making tremendous use of every crease and crag in his face. And the story itself will leave you shaken.