Happy Amazon Prime Day 2022 everyone!
If you’re on the hunt for the best deals on this year’s Prime Day, TechRadar’s liveblog has them covered here.
As you probably know, a Prime membership is required to participate in Prime Day 2022. However, if you don’t want to take out a monthly subscription to the service, you can still access the offers with a 30-day trial (opens in a new tab), if you haven’t used the trial version in the last 12 months.
If you’ve chosen this option and signed up for a free trial, in addition to having access to all offers on Amazon, you also get a free month of Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service.
For its early years on the scene, Prime Video felt a lot in the shadow of Netflix with a superficial film offering and hardly any originals, but now that has all changed. The Prime Originals roster is stacked and supported by Amazon’s money mountain, they are spending a lot, most notably on the new Lord of the Rings TV show The Rings Of Power, which is coming this fall.
But if you’re new to Prime Video and haven’t seen anything on the platform before, you may feel overwhelmed by the series of shows and movies. Don’t worry, we’re here to help, and to make sure you’re using your time wisely, we’ve narrowed that down to four shows to get you started.
Based on our calculations (at least as of this writing), you have one month and two and a half hours a night to watch television, five nights a week. That’s 30 days in all, minus eight days for weekends, which gives us 22 days to play. Multiply 22 by two and a half and you get 55 hours, and we’ve allotted them all.
So let’s dive in, our picks of the best of Prime Video …
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
This is a great call, but our first recommendation is something that will take up more than half of your free month. See the article : Best Reality Shows On Amazon Prime Video. However, we are confident you will not regret it.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is the creation of Amy Sherman-Palladino, best known for the long-running and much-loved drama Mom to a Friend, and follows the travails of Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel. At the start of the show, Maisel is a housewife in New York in the 1950s.
After her husband reveals that he is having an affair, she takes the stage of a cabaret drunk and collapses the house. From that moment on, she pursues her new vocation, despite protests from her ex-husband, parents and friends.
Led by Rachel Brosnahan, who has been showered with awards for her starring role on the show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is smart, very funny, incredibly heartwarming, and completely addicting. In addition to Brosnahan, there are great supporting performances by Alex Borstein as his down-to-earth manager Susie Myerson, Marin Hinkle and Tony Shalhoub as his quirky and long-suffering parents, and Luke Kirby as comedian Lenny Bruce, who makes appearances. regular.
All four seasons will take you just over 28 hours. That’s just over half the time you’ll have with this free trial, but it’s definitely worth it.
Modern Love
Anthology series are generally reserved for horror and science fiction, shows like Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone, but Modern Love has reinvented the formula beautifully. Read also : Prime Day Prime Video Deal: Paramount+, Starz, Showtime and more for just $0.99 for 2 months.
Based on the New York Times column of the same name, the show adapts different love stories of all ages and types. The first season was set entirely in New York, while the second was shooting all over the place.
The list of stars who have filmed an episode is huge, including Anne Hathaway, Andrew Scott, Olivia Cooke, Tina Fey, Julia Garner, Kit Harrington, Ed Sheeran and Sofia Boutella.
Not all episodes are winning, but the highs are really high and each episode is interesting and very inspiring. No episode lasts longer than 35 minutes, which is frustrating at times because some of these stories are so delicious that they deserve a movie of their own. But, with 16 episodes in all averaging 30 minutes each, that’s only eight hours, which still has 19 hours to play with.
Reacher
From 16 small vignettes covering the entire spectrum of love to something a little more muscular. On the same subject : Top Netflix Movies and Shows: What’s Trending On June 22, 2022. Well, much more muscular.
After two modestly successful but critically criticized films starring Tom Cruise in the title role, author Lee Child’s bestselling series Jack Reacher has finally found its rhythm on TV with Reacher.
Jack Reacher is a former major and military policeman in the US Army who, after leaving the army, decides to wander the United States doing odd jobs and somehow always finding himself investigating suspicious and often dangerous situations.
Longtime fans of the books weren’t happy with Cruise’s casting largely due to the actor’s height. Cruise is five feet seven and, on the page, Reacher is six feet five. When asked about this at the time, Child said there was no actor of that stature who could play Reacher effectively. Clearly, at that point, he had not been introduced to Alan Ritchson. Ritchson is not quite as tall as Reacher (he is six foot eight), but the man is built like a tank and wide like a cruise ship. It literally dominates every scene it is in.
The series adapts Child’s first book, Killing Floor, and sees Reacher’s arrival in the city of Margrave, Georgia, at the exact moment the small U.S. town is recovering from its first major crime in 20 years. Mistakenly framed for the crime, Reacher clears his name and reluctantly agrees to help the local police, which is just as good, as the bodies keep appearing.
Action-packed, well written and with a lot of wry humor, Reacher is a good watch. Critics and audiences also liked it, because a second season is in production. The show is all done in eight episodes, each of which is roughly an hour each, so that still leaves us with 11 to play with.
The Underground Railroad
Our final recommendation is The Underground Railroad, Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Set in 10 episodes, the show is named after the network of secret routes and safe havens during the 19th century in the United States, which helped enslaved African Americans escape.
In Whitehead and Jenkins’ version, the railroad is real, a real railway system built by slaves, complete with steam locomotives and multiple underground stations, all designed to assist fugitives.
We mostly follow Cora, who is enslaved on Randall’s plantation. A fellow slave named Caesar keeps trying to get her to run away with him, but she refuses, stating that the plantation is her place. After one of their fellow slaves, who attempted to escape, is recaptured and violently killed as a spectacle for the plantation owner and his guests, Cora eventually agrees to escape. In search of the couple are the fearsome slave hunter Arnold Ridgeway and his assistant Homer, so it’s a race against time for our would-be heroes.
Newcomer Thuso Mbedu offers an exciting twist as Cora, while Joel Edgerton is in terrifying form as Ridgeway. Jenkins directs each episode of the show, which is ambitious, well-designed and compelling, while not shy away from the horrors of the period.
There are plenty of other Prime Video shows and movies that we could have included – The Boys and Invincible come to mind – but the quartet above fulfills the criteria of flying under the radar and / or being an award-winning series. Regardless, with the four shows seen above (and probably enjoyed) on your part, you’ll still have an hour to spare. Happy Prime Day, enjoy your free trial!
Tom Goodwyn is TechRadar’s Senior Entertainment Editor. Oversee TechRadar’s coverage of the best TV shows, documentaries and movies across streaming services, cinema and beyond. Based in London, she loves nothing more than spending all day in the cinema, well she did it before she had two children …
Tom Goodwyn is TechRadar’s Senior Entertainment Editor. Oversee TechRadar’s coverage of the best TV shows, documentaries and movies across streaming services, cinema and beyond. Based in London, she loves nothing more than spending all day in the cinema, well she did it before she had two children …
