The Best TV Shows on Amazon Prime

If the first season of Transparent, Amazon Prime’s trailblazing-in-all-ways dramedy, was your first foray into the online behemoth’s members-only streaming service, congratulations!



One show down, about 1,300 to go! To help you navigate Prime’s overabundance of programming, we’ve whittled down all the possibilities, giving you our picks for the best shows from all genres. And because shows are often displayed on Prime’s browsing interfaces organized (or really, disorganized) by season, we’ve also suggested which individual season of a show is the best for newbies to dive into first (or for old-time fans to cue up, should you fancy a binge down memory lane). Check it out, and feel free to tell us what we missed in the comments. 
DRAMA 
The Americans, Season 1 
More people need to watch this show, and if describing it bluntly as “Alias meets Homeland” is a way of getting you to do so, that’s fine. What you’ll see once you get past that tagline-y depiction is a multi-multi-layered drama that brilliantly equates marriage and espionage. (Let’s face it, the latter is how the former sometimes feels.) Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Russian spies in the Cold War '80s who live in the suburbs of D.C., deep undercover as parents of two clean-cut American children. 

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