5 Best TV Shows on Amazon Prime

Mr. Robot

If you’ve heard nothing but ecstatic praise for Mr. Robot, let me be the 22nd to tell you: it’s true, it’s all true. Few single seasons of television distinguish themselves so quickly from the glut of familiar, visually dull dramas that networks churn out with the efficiency of a cat-food-canning operation as Mr. Robot, which follows the doings of a deeply unstable hacker named Elliot living in a small Manhattan apartment. Creator Sam Esmail, who took on the series after his fascinating yet facile romantic drama Comet, cleverly creates a distinct fictional world where the world is all-but-owned by Evil Corp, or E Corp, which has a logo that suggests a riff off of several bank logos, most noticeably Bank of America, and its potency is bolstered by nuanced characters and alluring, clever visuals. The shots throughout the season are pointedly off-kilter, placing characters in corners or to the side often, bringing out the displacement and alienation that our hero (the intensely engaging Rami Malek) is increasingly overwhelmed by. The exquisite editing stirs these images up into a bewitching spell of aesthetics and ruminative, rigorous performances from Malek, Christian Slater, Portia Doubleday, Carly Chaikin, and Martin Wallstrom as Elliot’s friendly nemesis at Evil Corp. Even as the show’s second season has hit some dull moments, the spell Mr. Robot casts remains intoxicating.

Orphan Black

If you don’t know why everyone’s rooting for Tatiana Maslany to win an Emmy, you better start watching BBC America’s Orphan Black – immediately. Maslany leads the show as Sarah Manning, a young woman who witnesses someone committing suicide. Even worse? That someone looks exactly like her. It turns out, Sarah is one of many clones and that right there is why Maslany deserves some major credit for her work on the show. Having one actress portray multiple characters here is most certainly not a gimmick. Maslany completely loses herself in each and every clone, single handedly creating an ensemble of unique characters that are all fascinating to track as a group and as individuals.

The writers have also done a remarkable job keeping the material fresh and interesting from season to season without ever spinning out of control. Clearly there’s a science fiction-like component to the show and while Orphan Black does challenge viewers to assess extreme scenarios and keep track of a lot of moving parts, almost everything enhances the mystery and experience overall.

American Horror Story

American Horror Story is classic soapy melodrama with a twisted horror infusion that I just adore. As a narrative, American Horror Story tends to falter, focusing on the “horror” over the “story”, but as a spectacle it always delivers. Inevitably, each season concocts a mad pastiche of horror traditions, turning familiar tropes into debauched, and sometimes downright kinky, tales of terror. Then there’s the genius concept — a rotating troupe of actors reinvented each season as they inhabit new time periods and subgenres. Genuinely amazing actors like Sarah Paulson, Angela Basset and Kathy Bates return to Murphy’s crazy worlds time and time again because they get to perform such unusual out-of-the-box roles, and it’s obvious how much fun they’re having doing it. But perhaps the greatest of all American Horror Story‘s achievements — it gifted us with the resurgence of Jessica Lange. All hail The Supreme.

Hannibal

Even in the oeuvre of a visionary like Bryan Fuller, there has never been anything remotely like Hannibal. To call the show, which fleshes out the skeletal structure of Thomas Harris’ series of novels about Hannibal the Cannibal, cinematic would be borderline diminutive. Fuller takes the relationship between the titular psychiatrist-serial killer, played with grand theatrical oomph by Mads Mikkelsen, and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the FBI profiler who is unknowingly tracking him, as the central heart of the series, and their clashes evoke astonishing ideas about masculinity, bestiality, sexuality, and the act of killing. The writing is uniformly fantastic, strewn with succulent allusions to art, cooking, literature, and music, but the pull of this short-lived, unparalleled series is its use of imagery, editing, and music. The series is sensory overload, with the primitive yet sophisticated score echoing the scraping of flesh and drops of blood expanding in and reverberating off a pool of liquid, and the imagery fading and cutting into a glorious barrage of horror and heat. And this is not even getting into the exceptional supporting cast, led by career-best work from the likes of Laurence Fishburne, Gillian Anderson, Caroline Dhavernas, and Scott Thompson.

Hannibal is ten times more rebellious, more genuinely insightful than any show that HBO, FX, or AMC has put out, and yet NBC let it go due to low viewership, having no concept of its growing cult status and its sterling online reputation. The axing of Hannibal will go down as NBC’s Freaks & Geeks and Firefly all rolled into one, a lasting, shaming indictment of NBC’s programming department and the way success is measured by the numbers in primetime television.

The Boys

There’s no shortage of superhero content in 2019, but you won’t find anything more insightful, incisive and downright entertaining as The Boys, the latest Garth Ennis adaptation from Preacher dup Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, with the polished TV hand of co-creator Eric Kripke. A scathing takedown of corporate greed, celebrity worship, political perversion, and all the horrible ways thought cultural ills can co-mingle, The Boys never lets its politics get ahead of its payoff, drenching the “realistic” take on superheroes in exploitation levels of sex and violence, ensuring that you’ll be gasping and guffawing, even as the deeper implications nibble at your comfort. For my money, you won’t find a more complex or chilling villain on TV this year than Anthony Starr‘s gleaming portrayal of Homelander, and he’s well-matched in the best use of Elisabeth Shue‘s talents in years. Urban is delightfully unhinged, Capon is the secret weapon of the series, and it’s all delivered in the most binge-worthy style, as entertaining as it is enlightening through and through