Prime Video is one of the more unusual of the streaming services; from its democratic origins (viewers voting for what pilots should get series orders), to its now genre-heavy lineup of originals, its streaming slate is kind of all over the place. It’s also a good place to find shows that aired on other networks, and it’s become a home for shows that often didn’t have streaming homes for a long time, for various reasons. Standard dramas are a rarity on Prime Video, but there are a few well worth a binge.
These are 10 of the best dramas to binge on Prime Video. Prime Video has plenty of great sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and superhero shows, but these are their more grounded offerings. There’s a mix of Prime Originals and beloved classics here, too.
1) Daisy Jones and the Six
Prime Video has some dramatic miniseries that are originals, but they’re not as prolific as some of the other streaming services. Daisy Jones and the Six is one of the few that is strictly drama and is also not an anthology. An adaptation of the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, this soapy miniseries tells the behind-the-scenes tale of a fictional band from the 1970s that is definitely not Fleetwood Mac.
Sam Claflin and Riley Keough are the main rivals and lovers of the show. It’s worth a watch if you like the California music scene aesthetic of the 1970s, and if you enjoy Claflin or Keough (or both), it’s a treat.
2) Desperate Housewives
Desperate Housewives premiered in quite possibly the most incredible fall season of television: 2004. Because of how soapy it was, it often got forgotten among its televisual siblings — Boston Legal, House M.D., Lost, Veronica Mars, (to name a few) — but it was entertaining and over-the-top from start to finish.
Its entire eight-season run is on Prime Video, and it’s a chance to binge a show that never lost its mid-aughts charms.
3) Secret Diary of a Call Girl
When Secret Diary of a Call Girl debuted in 2007, it served as Billie Piper’s follow-up to her first stint on Doctor Who as Rose Tyler, and it was quite the follow-up. It’s another dramedy, but the stakes are still high, as it focuses on the life and times of Hannah Baxter, who is secretly a call girl named “Belle.”
It’s based on the memoirs of a real, former call girl, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, who had a very popular, anonymous blog in the early 2000s. Piper as Hannah got a chance to be more than just The Doctor’s companion, joining a host of female TV protagonists who were allowed to be unlikable when they needed to be.
4) Dead Like Me
Dead Like Me is one of legendary TV writer Bryan Fuller’s “gone too soon” shows. It’s a dramedy about a pack of reapers who are tasked with ensuring people’s souls go peacefully right before they die.
George, the series’s protagonist, dies right as the show starts; a toilet seat from a dying space station falls from the heavens and kills her. Rube (Mandy Patinkin) is the head of the band of reapers as they do their mortal clean-up tasks. It’s a charming take on a procedural, and even if it couldn’t have much of a life on Showtime, it lives on in streaming paradise on Prime Video.
5) Mozart in the Jungle
The episode lengths of Mozart in the Jungle run at most 30 minutes, but it’s still a very dramatic dramedy. It revolves around the bombastic world of classical music in New York. Specifically, it focuses on a symphony trying to improve its odds in a crowded pool of similar organizations.
Symphony president Gloria (Broadway legend Bernadette Peters) tries to keep things afloat administratively, and that includes wresting control from conductor Thomas Pembridge (the equally legendary Malcolm McDowell), who isn’t happy to be supplanted. He’s replaced by the young, ridiculous conductor-composer Rodrigo, played by Gael Garcia Bernal. Lola Kirke plays the young oboist trying to stay afloat in all of this.
It’s a quirky, fun show that finds drama in its setting and the challenging personalities that populate its world.
6) Moonlighting
Moonlighting, one of the “it” shows of the late 1980s, was missing from streaming for years, due to music rights. That changed in 2023, when Moonlighting first appeared on Hulu, and now it’s also on Prime Video in its entirety.
It’s definitely a dramedy at heart, but it has the average episode length of a drama at the time, and each episode is about solving crimes, as well as the relationship between David Addison (Bruce Willis) and Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd). It’s a chunk of television history, and it’s so good it’s now available to binge.
7) Reacher
Reacher packs a punch, and it could run forever. The adaptation of the novels by Lee Child is probably one of Amazon’s biggest hits in a while.
Alan Ritchson as the eponymous lead character is playing a role he seems born to play. He’s surrounded by great character actors supporting him, and the action is always killer. If you start binging it now, you’ll catch up by the time its fourth season starts streaming (probably sometime next year).
8) Manhattan
Less than a decade before Oppenheimer dropped into theaters, Manhattan debuted for its short run on WGN America, the basic cable network that tried (and failed) to be the next big thing as AMC was really taking off with its hits Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
Manhattan was definitely in the Mad Men model, but instead of telling the fictional stories of ad executives, it told the story of mostly fictional scientists and engineers working at the real Los Alamos on the atomic bomb. It’s a tense, tight show; it was gone too soon, but the two seasons we do have tell a complete story, ending with the Trinity Test. The creators may not have been aiming for strict historical accuracy, but it feels emotionally resonant for what that time and place must have felt like.
9) The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Rachel Brosnahan had her second series regular role in Manhattan, where she played a miserable, depressed housewife; her first was in Netflix’s House of Cards, where she played a miserable prostitute. Getting the role of the eponymous Mrs. Maisel in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel must’ve been an incredible relief; Midge might be depressed occasionally, but she’s never miserable enough that she can’t find a solution for her problems, even if that solution is sometimes worse than the actual problems.
The story of a pioneering female comic trying to make it in what was very much a man’s world isn’t always perfect, but it’s never boring. It’s got a bouncing, nervy energy, and Brosnahan really proves she’s a star in every episode.
10) The Terror
Technically, only the first season of The Terror is on Prime Video; that’s actually perfectly fine, because each season of the show tells a complete narrative, and currently, the first season is still some of the best television made this century.
The Terror tells the story of the doomed Franklin Expedition to navigate the last section of the almost mythical Northwest Passage, and it’s dedicated in its pursuit of showing the hubris of most of the men, as well as their desperate attempts at survival. Jared Harris is surrounded by a supporting cast of mostly British actors, who are all excellent, and all very good at looking absolutely freezing.
What dramas do you recommend people binge on Prime Video? Let us know in the comments below!
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