HBO
Last Updated: November 1st
Netflix does not hold the monopoly on good series worth streaming. While Netflix certainly features more and better original programming, Amazon Prime Video holds their own in that department, and they continue to beef up their offerings. As far as licensed content goes, however, Amazon Prime may hold a slight edge, thanks to owning exclusive rights to HBO’s back catalogue.
If you’re trying to figure out what to watch next, here’s a great place to start with a look at 25 of the best shows on Amazon Prime Instant Video right now, and none of these titles are currently available on Netflix.
Related: The 20 Best Movies On Amazon Instant Video Right Now
25. The Man in the High Castle (2 of 2 seasons)
Amazon
Loosely based on Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name (it also bears some resemblance to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America), The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternative, dystopian world where Germany won World War II. Basically, the East Coast is occupied by the Germans, and the West Coast is occupied by the Japanese, and there’s a no-man’s land in between. Exec-produced by Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files), the series sees various characters working to form a resistance against their occupation by collecting “forbidden newsreels” that show the alternate history in which the Allies won the war in an effort to reveal a larger 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 plenty of twists and turns to keep viewers guessing.
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24. Mozart in the Jungle (2 of 2 seasons)
Amazon
Created by Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Paul Weitz, Mozart in the Jungle stars Gael García Bernal as an orchestra conductor and Lola Kirke as a oboist/protégé. The cast is rounded out with beloved actors like Malcolm McDowell and Bernadette Peters, and familiar faces like Safron Burrows. Mozart is sweet and low key. Viewers who like Canada’s exceptional Slings and Arrows will like Mozart in the Jungle because it’s essentially Slings and Arrows with classical music instead of Shakespeare. It is frothy and fun, and an absolute pleasure to watch, even if it is not exactly essential television.
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23. Red Oaks (2 of 2 seasons)
Amazon
Created by Joe Gangemi and longtime Soderbergh collaborator Gregory Jacobs, Red Oaks is set in the 1980s and stars Craig Roberts (Submarine) as a college-aged tennis instructor working at a country club. He has a girlfriend who also works at the country club with him. He’s an aimless kid, and he has no idea what to do with his life, although his father (Richard Kind) wants him to become an accountant. His mother (Jennifer Grey), meanwhile, may have a thing for women. The smartly written sitcom has an early David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls) sensibility (he exec produces, and directs three episodes), and may be best described as a cross between Summer School and The Wonder Years. The best reason to watch, however, is Kind, who brings an immense amount of humor and poignancy to the first season.
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22. Suits (5 of 6 seasons)
USA Network
A legal drama that almost never steps inside a courtroom, Suits stars Gabriel Macht and Patrick Adams as a brash, big-league attorney and his whiz-kid protégé, who is practicing illegally without a law degree. Suits, which has a tenuous understanding of the law, deals week-to-week mostly with settling disputes with cocky threats and yellow manilla folders. It’s rounded out by a fun, USA Network-perfect cast (Sarah Rafferty, Gina Torres, Meghan Markle, and Rick Hoffman) and later seasons of the series are more serialized in nature, dealing primarily with interoffice politics and relationship drama. Nothing about Suits is altering the television landscape (in fact, every episode is the same), and the show is certainly not any threat to television’s heavier dramas. However, over the course of the series, it’s become a rock-solid show, and one that was willing to break out of the typical USA Network procedural format years before Mr. Robot came along.
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21. Eastbound and Down (4 of 4 seasons)
Via HBO
Eastbound and Down tracks the brash, blowhard Kenny Powers, a once-superstar major-league baseball relief pitcher, whose catchphrase was “You’re f*cking out.” He was the “man who could throw his ball fast as f*ck,” but after his rocket arm began to fail him and he resorted to steroids, he quickly flamed out and was driven out of the sport. Trying to to make his way back through the minor league system, Danny McBride’s character is broke and forced to live with his brother (Deadwood’s John Hawkes) and take employ as the small-town’s substitute coach. “Yeah. Your new teacher cusses. Let’s get used to it, okay.” Kenny also runs into a fellow teacher, April “Big Cannons” Buchanan, his old high-school sweetheart, and tries to reignite the flame with her, but is repeatedly shut down. Eastbound and Down is not for everyone, and the over-the-top antics of McBride’s character may wear thin for some, but few shows are as rowdy and in-your-face funny as the HBO series.
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20. Flight of the Conchords (2 of 2 seasons)
HBO
Centered around “New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo a capella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo,” the series follows fictionalized versions of Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie as they attempt to make it big in the United States, along with their manager (Rhys Darby) and sole fan/stalker (Kristen Schaal). Flight of the Conchords is likable and charming; the humor is dry and low-key, and the songs are earnest, and often very funny, and catchy. (Season one’s musical sequences are better, but season two makes up for it with funnier storylines.) Infinitely quotable, and often inspired, the sardonic humor also makes Conchords a worthy New Zealand successor to This Is Spinal Tap.
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19. Orphan Black (3 of 4 seasons)
BBC America
Tatiana Maslany plays several clones variations of the same woman in the sweeping conspiracy thriller Orphan Black, and she breathes so much life and so many distinct personalities into each clone that viewers often forget that one woman is playing all the characters (and it’s impossible not to pick a favorite). The supporting cast is mostly great, as well, and for a Canadian series, the production values are excellent. Unfortunately, Orphan Black suffers from a great first season that the rest of the series can’t quite live up to. It gets so bogged down in its own confusing mythology that it begins to run out of steam, although it picks up its momentum again in the fourth season as it heads toward the finish line. (It’s scheduled to run for five seasons.)
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18. Vikings (4 of 4 seasons)
Loosely based on the exploits of the 9th century Viking ruler and king, Ragnar Lodbrok, Vikings doesn’t match the level of complexity in Game of Thrones — the universe is smaller, there are fewer characters, and the plotting isn’t as dense — but it’s a solid, if not sometimes spectacular drama that gets progressively better over the course of the series. There’s crunching violence, lots of axe play, and frequent battles as Ragnar extends his rule over parts of Europe. Compared to Game of Thrones, it’s less about mind games and schemes, and more about brute force — and Ragnor’s victories are seldom in doubt. Nevertheless, It’s entertaining to watch the unrelenting violence unfold and revel in the demise of Ragnor’s rivals. While Travis Fimmel is excellent in the lead role and Gustaf Skarsgård’s Floki provides the often necessary comic relief, it’s Katheryn Winnick — as Lagertha — who is the show’s biggest draw.
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17. Hannibal (3 of 3 seasons)
ABC
Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal is a perfect series to binge-watch, as the ability to watch the episodes back-to-back evens out some of the slow pacing. Hannibal is dark, macabre, and brilliantly creative, and while it has many of the same characters viewers know and appreciate from the movie/book series, it also has an entirely different and unique tone (some would even say better). The murder scenes are equally gruesome and gorgeous, the series’ long arc is as disturbing as it is engrossing, and the acting from Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelson and Laurence Fishburne is superb. It’s a slow, morbidly addictive burn, and viewers must stick around for Michael Pitt’s Mason Verger in season two, if only for one of the most beautifully unsettling sequences ever seen on network television.
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16. The Good Wife (7 of 7 seasons)
CBS
Fans of Suits will love The Good Wife, as it’s essentially the rich-man’s version of that show, dealing with the same brand of interoffice politics while mixing in some legal procedural elements to its ongoing serialized storylines. The Good Wife also covers the conflicts that arise between work and relationships, as well as the marriage between a law firm associate and her husband, a state district attorney — and later governor — caught early on in a prostitution scandal. Having just completed its seven-season run on CBS, The Good Wife was one of few Emmy-worthy dramas remaining on the broadcast networks, and no show on television filled its guest roles better — it had 13 Emmy nominations and two wins in the guest acting categories alone. The show began to run out of steam near the end of its run, but it remained mostly entertaining throughout.
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15. Catastrophe (2 of 2 seasons)
Amazon
The British sitcom is essentially You’re the Worst if the couple at the center of it were 10 years older. Like the FX series, it’s another anti-romcom romcom, although this one involves pregnancy, children, and culture clash (he’s an American wanker, she’s an acerbic, potty-mouthed British school teacher). However, the constant bickering and sexual disagreements between Rob (Rob Delaney) and Sharon (Sharon Horgan) are what makes Catastrophe so exhilarating. A more apt name for the series would be Amazon’s other series, Transparent, because the relationship between Sharon and Rob — warts and all — is the most open and honest in television, and maybe the funniest. The only downside to Catastrophe is that its two seasons are each only six half-hour episodes long, and six hours is not enough time to spend with these characters. (The series has been renewed for two more seasons.)
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14. Mr. Robot (1 of 2 seasons)
USA
The best new show of 2015, USA Network’s Mr. Robot follows Elliot, a hacker with acute social anxiety disorder who suffers from delusions and paranoia. During the day, he works as a computer programmer for a company that protects other companies from cyberthreats. Elliot has other designs in mind, too, namely taking down one of the biggest corporations in America, E Corp, unsettling America’s financial system, and taking power away from the rich and giving it back to the people. Heavily influenced by American Psycho, Fight Club, the films of Stanley Kubrick, and Taxi Driver, among others, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot is an unnerving mindf*ck full of conspiracy theories and misdirections. Nothing is ever as it seems in Mr. Robot, and much of the fun is in trying — and mostly failing — to stay ahead of the twists.
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13. Sex and the City (6 of 6 seasons)
HBO
Based on Candace Bushnell’s 1997 book of the same name, Sex and the City put HBO original comedy on the map in the same way that The Sopranos did for its dramas. Following the lives of four New York City women, the series reveled in decadent fashion, relationship matters, and of course, sex. It was a fashion magazine come to life. In the intervening years, Sex and the City has had a number of imitators — some better, some worse — which may have the effect of making the original seem dated. (The ’90s pop-cultural references don’t help.) Still, the groundbreaking series is essential viewing because of the way it changed the conversation about women and sex, even if some of those themes are ultimately neutralized by the materialism.
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12. Transparent (3 of 3 seasons)
Amazon
Amazon may not stack up favorably against Netflix in the original series department, but Transparent is as good or better than most of Netflix’s original series. It sees Jeffrey Tambor decide, late in life, to transition into a woman, and we see how that decision affects her family in the most hilarious and poignant ways imaginable. It’s a light series with heavy themes, and truly one of the best new currently running series on television, racking up 20 Emmy nominations and eight wins, so far.
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11. Boardwalk Empire (4 of 5 seasons)
HBO
Nominated for 57 Emmys (winning 20), Boardwalk Empire takes a simmering novelistic approach to its storytelling. Brilliantly acted, and meticulously plotted, Boardwalk Empire can be a slow burn while the audience waits for the pieces to come together. With a sprawling cast spread out geographically and numerous plotline tentacles flowing away from the series’ main character, Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), the Terence Winter series is historical fiction at its best. Loosely based on the life of Nucky Johnson, Boardwalk Empire examines the bootlegging industry in Atlantic City during the Prohibition era, and it brings in a host of familiar names including Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein. However, it is often the series-created characters played by Michael Pitt, Jack Huston, Charlie Cox, Michael Shannon, Michael K. Williams, and Kelly Macdonald who are the most riveting. It’s a fascinating series from a historical standpoint (it tracks the rise of the modern mafia), absorbing from a storytelling standpoint, and remarkable from an acting standpoint. It is quietly one of HBO’s best ever dramas.
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10. Veronica Mars (3 of 3 seasons)
Warner Brothers
In this private-detective/coming-of-age dramedy, showrunner Rob Thomas mastered the art of mixing series long arcs and cases of the week (much like Thomas’ iZombie does now), blending plot with a droll Whedon-esque sense of humor, a love triangle, and a Jason Katims-like family dynamic. It’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Justified, and Parenthood all rolled into one. For two seasons, Veronica Mars is as close to a perfect show as can be, and it also helped launch the careers of Kristen Bell, Amanda Seyfried, and Krysten Ritter.
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9. Deadwood (3 of 3 seasons)
FX
In television’s greatest all-time Western series, David Milch creates a brilliantly distinctive universe peopled with characters who speak their own language, a pungent one that is Shakespeare, profanity, and gunslinger all rolled into one. Set in 1870’s South Dakota, Deadwood charts the growth of Deadwood from a small camp into town, basing many of the characters on real-life historical figures like Al Swearengen, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, and George Hearst. It also stars an incredible collection of talent — Timothy Olyphant, Anna Gunn, Ian McShane, Molly Parker, John Hawkins, Kim Dickens, and John Hawkes, among many others — who bring the town alive with all its danger, corruption, and family struggles. Those sensitive to profanity, however, should steer clear — in three seasons, nearly 3,000 utterances of the word “f*ck” are employed, and not one is ever wasted.
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8. Doctor Who (9 of 9 seasons)
BBC
Doctor Who is a long-running British series that follows the adventures of a Time Lord and his companion as they travel throughout space and time in the TARDIS. Doctor Who can be a little cheesy, but it is nevertheless one of those shows that’s difficult not to become completely invested in once you begin. Viewers who may not even consider themselves sci-fi geek should give it a shot because Doctor Who may be the show that converts them. It isn’t just a sci-fi show, it is a series about love and heartbreak and loneliness, about coming of age, about humanity and about loss. Maybe even more than that, watching Doctor Who is not just a television experience, it’s a cultural one, one of the rare shows capable of connecting people across the globe.
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7. Curb Your Enthusiasm (8 of 8 seasons)
HBO
The long-running HBO series about a fictionalized version of Larry David is as uncomfortable as it is funny, as misanthropic as it is clever. David, of course, was the inspiration for George Constanza on Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm often feels like a Constanza spin-off (which makes the Seinfeld reunion season within the show complicated). Like Seinfeld, Curb is about nothing — or more specifically, the minutia of daily life — with a particular attention paid to daily annoyances. It’s a brilliant show for the way it unpacks trivialities — as its 39 Emmy nominations attests — but it should be binged in short bursts because the show’s cynicism and general disdain for humanity is often hilarious, but it may also weigh heavily after several hours.
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6. Justified (6 of 6 seasons)
fx
The fifth season might have been the one minor letdown in its run, but Justified came back strong in its sixth and final season, making it one of television’s best all-time complete series. Justified boasts not only the two most charismatic characters around in trigger-happy Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and its sly villain, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), but also the quickest 42 minutes on television. No hour-long drama flies by faster than Justified, which also makes it a great series to binge watch. Moreover, Justified not only boasts smart, economic Elmore Leonard-inspired writing and crackling dialogue (under the direction of showrunner Graham Yost), but the stories are as engrossing as Leonard’s were page-turning. It’s not a perfect series, but even its flaws are endearing. (Bonus: Justified also features nearly every major actor from Deadwood at some point in the series.)
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5. The Americans (3 of 4 seasons)
FX
The Americans follows Russian spies (Keri Russell and Mathew Rhys) posing as a married couple living in America, and while the missions are enjoyable, and the glimpse into the early 1980s is fascinating, the real pull in this show is the relationship drama, both between the married spies — who are often pulled between their love for one another and their love of country — an FBI agent (Noah Emmerich) who is pulled between his own relationship with his family and country, and the children of the Russian spies, pulled between their family and their love of America. Well-crafted, engrossing, and hypnotic, The Americans is one of best TV shows — if not the best TV show — right now, and its phenomenal recently completed fourth season finally gained the series the Emmy recognition it so richly deserves. With an end-point in mind (the series will end after six seasons), there’s no better time to start binge-watching The Americans than now.
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4. Veep (2 of 5 seasons)
HBO
Arguably the best comedy on television, and easily the smartest, Veep is the rare political satire that still works in post-Trump political environment because it’s not about electoral politics, it’s about the futility of politics. It’s about how people stumble into positions of leadership, not because they are good people, or smart people, or even politically savvy people, but because the system rewards mediocrity and dysfunction. It is a sharp, profane, and intensely funny series, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus — winner of three consecutive Emmy awards for her role in Veep — turns in the best comedic performance of the decade, and she is surrounded by television’s best ensemble.
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3. Six Feet Under (5 of 5 seasons)
HBO
Six Feet Under is about the different ways in which people deal with grief. The show is at its best when it focused simply on the deaths — when it used the loss of life to prove a point about living. Like no other show before or since, Six Feet Under confronts death head on, splintering taboos, and taking a hundred different maxims and extracting all the cliche out of them, making us appreciate what death meant without the torture of “He’s in a better place now.” In fact, in the final episode of that first season, Nate offered up the best thing anyone has ever said about dying on television. When a hysterical woman asked Nate, “Why do people die?” he paused briefly, and then offered the perfect rejoinder: “To make life important.” Six Feet Under gives us a glimpse into other people’s grieving process so that we can better understand our own. Over a decade later, and SFU can still boast the greatest series finale ever.
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2. The Sopranos (6 of 6 seasons)
HBO
The godfather of prestige dramas, David Chase’s series follows the life of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), as he struggles like so many of us with the work-life balance, only his work is running a criminal organization and his life involves a complicated, suburban Italian family. Spanning six seasons, The Sopranos may be the best-written series of all time, and often places first or second on lists of the greatest television series of all time. (This author would place it third, behind The Wire and Breaking Bad, though both of those shows owe a great debt to The Sopranos, which created the template for the modern anti-hero and kicked off the Golden Age of television.) Regardless of where it is placed among the greatest of all time, it is essential television viewing, a masterpiece rich with nuance, comedy, brutality, and emotion, as well as some of the best drawn characters in any medium.
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1. The Wire (5 of 5 seasons)
HBO
The Wire gave us Omar Little. It gave us Stringer Bell. And Bunk, McNulty, Kima, Bubbles, and so many other characters. The Wire examines the Baltimore drug scene from the perspective of the police and the drug dealers, and it humanizes both sides of the war on drugs. It confronts deep-seated problems in the inner city in accessible ways, and it unpacks the bureaucracy surrounding those issues in a way that makes us understand the struggles of law enforcement in their efforts to tackle the drug problem and the plight of the dealers. Spanning five seasons, The Wire is like a series of interconnected novels featuring deeply flawed, but deeply human characters. It’s a one-of-a-kind series, a show that is not only entertaining, thoughtful, and insightful, but also necessary.
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For everything else you should be streaming on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, check out our comprehensive What To Watch guide.