[
Prime Video has become, and we say this respectfully, a graveyard for some of the best TV that nobody has watched. While the streamer spends millions marketing Reacher and The Boys, a staggering number of critically adored originals have slipped through the cracks, collecting dust in the algorithm while audiences scroll right past them toward whatever just dropped. It’s a crime, and someone needs to answer for it.
The good news is that all of these shows are still sitting right there, waiting to be discovered, and most of them clock in at under 20 episodes total. That’s barely a weekend commitment for anyone who has some time to kill and an all-consuming need to escape reality. Here are the forgotten Prime Video series that, in our humble opinion, deserve to be binged from start to finish.
‘Homecoming’ (2018–2020)
Sam Esmail, the Mr. Robot mastermind, directed every episode of Homecoming‘s first season and it shows. Julia Roberts stars as Heidi Bergman, a caseworker at a facility designed to help soldiers transition back to civilian life who, years later, can’t quite remember why she left the job. The show toggles between two timelines, 30-minute episodes shot in different aspect ratios, with Bobby Cannavale barking orders over the phone and Stephan James breaking your heart as a veteran named Walter Cruz who trusted the wrong people.
Season two swaps Roberts for Janelle Monáe waking up in a rowboat with no memory, and somehow it all still works. Esmail shoots Homecoming like a ’70s thriller compressed into a half-hour format, and the restraint is what makes it so addictive. The two-season run is shorter than most prestige dramas’ single seasons, and the result is a show that never lingers longer than it needs to. It’s the kind of binge-watch you finish in a day and immediately want to start again, just to catch what you missed.
‘Patriot’ (2015–2018)
The easiest way to describe Patriot is, it’s a spy show about a depressed intelligence officer who processes his trauma by writing folk songs about his classified missions and performing them at open mic nights. The harder way to describe it is that it’s one of the most original, devastating comedies ever made. Michael Dorman plays John Tavner, a CIA operative ordered by his father (Terry O’Quinn) to go undercover at a Milwaukee industrial piping firm to prevent Iran from going nuclear. Everything goes wrong immediately. Steven Conrad created both seasons of this show, wrote most of the episodes, and directed the entire second season, which earned a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics who actually found it.
Patriot is the kind of show that asks you to laugh at a man pushing a fellow job applicant in front of a moving van so he can secure a mid-level position at a piping company, and then, 20 minutes later, asks you to sit in complete silence as that same man sings about wanting to die. Debra Winger shows up in Season 2 as John’s mother, the Secretary of Transportation, and that’s as perfect as it sounds. Amazon canceled the show in 2019, and it has haunted us ever since.
‘Tales from the Loop’ (2020)
Based on the narrative art book by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, Tales from the Loop follows the interconnected residents of a fictional Ohio town built above an underground physics facility called the Loop. Rebecca Hall, Jonathan Pryce, and a rotating ensemble anchor eight standalone-ish episodes, each centered on a different character confronting something impossible: body swapping, time freezing, a robot wandering the woods. Nathaniel Halpern wrote every episode and the directors include Jodie Foster and Andrew Stanton.
This is a show scored in part by Philip Glass that looks like every frame could hang in an art gallery, and it earns that aesthetic ambition because the stories underneath the visuals are genuinely moving. It’s melancholy without being melodramatic, risky without being showy about it. The sci-fi elements exist to illuminate something achingly human about grief, aging, loneliness, and connection, and the restraint is what makes it resonate.
‘One Mississippi’ (2015–2017)
One Mississippi stars comedian Tig Notaro as a fictionalized version of herself: a deadpan LA radio host returning to her small Mississippi hometown after her mother’s death, while simultaneously recovering from a double mastectomy and a near-fatal infection. Created by Notaro and Diablo Cody, with a pilot directed by Nicole Holofcener, the show ran for two seasons and 12 episodes before Amazon axed it in 2018 as part of a pivot toward bigger, wider-audience series. It co-stars Noah Harpster as Tig’s brother Remy, John Rothman as her gloriously rigid stepfather Bill, and Stephanie Allynne (Notaro’s real-life wife) as Kate, a local radio producer.
What makes One Mississippi so special is its refusal to be any one thing. It’s a grief comedy, a queer love story, and a family drama about inherited trauma. The show’s 96% on Rotten Tomatoes is earned and then some. It’s got two seasons, a perfect ending Notaro herself said she was at peace with, and a specificity of voice that Amazon clearly didn’t know what to do with.
‘Undone’ (2019–2022)
From the creators of BoJack Horseman comes an animated series about a 28-year-old woman in San Antonio who, after a near-fatal car accident, starts seeing her dead father and discovers she may be able to manipulate time. Rosa Salazar voices Alma Winograd-Diaz with the exact ratio of biting humor to raw vulnerability, while Bob Odenkirk plays her physicist father, Jacob, who enlists her help in investigating his own death. The show was Amazon’s first adult animated original and the first series to use rotoscoping, a technique that paints over live-action footage to create a smeared, dreamy visual style that’s genuinely unlike anything else on television.
Across two seasons and 16 half-hour episodes, Undone pulls off something most time-travel shows fumble: it keeps you guessing whether Alma’s abilities are real or symptoms of a mental health crisis she’s inherited, and it never cheats the ambiguity. Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg wrote a show that’s simultaneously a family drama about generational trauma, a mystery about a father’s suspicious death, and a meditation on what it means to have a brain that works differently. The second season expands the story to include Alma’s sister and their mother’s past, and the emotional payoff hits like a freight train.
‘Vanity Fair’ (2018)
Before she was Alicent Hightower, Olivia Cooke was climbing a different social ladder. This seven-episode adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray‘s 1848 novel stars Cooke as Becky Sharp, a penniless orphan who weaponizes her charm, intelligence, and total lack of scruples to claw her way through Regency-era English society. Tom Bateman plays her empty-headed cavalry officer husband; Claudia Jessie is Becky’s sweet, hapless best friend Amelia; and Michael Palin narrates as Thackeray himself, breaking the fourth wall with a wink. The cast is stacked, the costumes are obscene in the best way, and Cooke plays Becky with the kind of gleeful, scheming energy that makes you root for a woman you absolutely should not be rooting for.
The production leans into its anachronisms with contemporary music cues and knowing glances at the camera, signaling early on that this isn’t a dusty prestige piece. It’s a show about a woman gaming a system built to exclude her, which is why Cooke’s Becky has been called one of the best screen versions of the character to date. At seven episodes, it moves faster than most period dramas, compressing years of Napoleonic warfare and romantic chaos into a tight, satisfying arc. For anyone who loved the political maneuvering in House of the Dragon but wishes there were more corsets and fewer dragons, this is the move.
‘ZeroZeroZero’ (2020)
Created by Stefano Sollima, the director behind Sicario: Day of the Soldado, and based on Roberto Saviano‘s nonfiction book about the global cocaine trade, ZeroZeroZero tracks a single massive cocaine shipment across three continents: from its production in Mexico to its delivery in Calabria, Italy, brokered by an American shipping family. Andrea Riseborough and Dane DeHaan play the Lynwood siblings running their father’s (Gabriel Byrne) shipping empire, which has been secretly moving product for years. Harold Torres stars as Manuel, a Mexican special forces soldier whose storyline is the most gripping and brutal thread in the series.
Three interlocking stories in multiple languages across eight episodes with a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes… this thing should’ve killed. Instead, the series dropped in March 2020, which means it had the misfortune of debuting at the exact moment the entire world stopped functioning. ZeroZeroZero deserved better than to be buried by a pandemic. The good news? We can correct that now.
‘Outer Range’ (2022–2024)
Outer Range opens with a simple enough premise: Josh Brolin plays Royal Abbott, a Wyoming rancher fighting to protect his land and family from a neighboring family. Then a mysterious black void appears in his west pasture, and the show becomes something else entirely. Imogen Poots plays Autumn, a cryptic drifter who camps out on the Abbotts’ land and appears to know more about the void than she should. Lili Taylor, Tom Pelphrey, and Lewis Pullman round out the Abbott family, and the whole ensemble commits to the material, despite how bonkers it gets.
Produced by Brad Pitt‘s Plan B Entertainment, Outer Range ran for two seasons before Amazon cancelled it in 2024, leaving a devoted audience bereft. The show isn’t flawless; it’s deliberately paced and sometimes too mysterious for its own good. But Brolin’s performance as a man who knows more about the void than he’ll admit is the kind of interior work he rarely gets to do on screen, and the series’ willingness to take massive swings with its mythology (time travel, identity loops, cosmic existentialism set to rodeo music) makes it a uniquely wild ride.
‘Dead Ringers’ (2023)
Alice Birch‘s six-episode reimagining of David Cronenberg’s 1988 body horror classic gender-swaps Jeremy Irons‘ twin gynecologists into twin OBGYNs played by Rachel Weisz, and the result won a Peabody Award. Beverly Mantle is the quieter, more ethical sister; Elliot Mantle is a boundary-demolishing hedonist who experiments on embryos and treats codependence like an Olympic sport. When Beverly falls for an actress named Genevieve (Britne Oldford), the twins’ symbiotic relationship starts to fracture, and Elliot’s behavior escalates from chaotic to genuinely terrifying. Jennifer Ehle and Poppy Liu co-star, and the series was directed by a murderer’s row of filmmakers, including Karyn Kusama.
Weisz’s dual performance is the kind of work that makes you furious awards voters don’t take genre television more seriously. The visual effects doubling her are seamless, but what sells the conceit is how differently she carries each sister in her body: Elliot is all manic energy and sharp angles, Beverly is pulled inward like she’s trying not to take up space. Birch uses the added real estate of six hours to turn Cronenberg’s premise into something pointed and contemporary, a story about reproductive autonomy, the fertility industry, and who gets to control women’s bodies. It is visceral, gory, funny, and deeply upsetting, frequently in the same scene. If you can handle it, it’s one of the best limited series Prime Video has ever produced.
https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/outer-range-season-2-noah-reid-1.jpeg?w=1600&h=900&fit=crop
https://collider.com/forgotten-prime-video-shows-perfect-start-to-finish/
Jessica Toomer
Almontather Rassoul
