30 Best Shows Of 2023 On Amazon Prime

There’s not a lot of good sumo representation out there. The ancient Japanese sport is often caricatured for laughs; in fact, it has a rich and complex history spanning centuries. It’s cultural but questionably brutal, revered but unable to compete against newer combat sports. And while sumo negotiates its role in an increasingly modern world, its participants continue to rely on it for a living, making it at once outdated and necessary.  

Enter Sanctuary, a Japanese Netflix original that captures all this nuance to the best of its ability. The drama is a gritty and realistic behind-the-scenes look at the sport, a raw portrait of all the literal blood, sweat, and tears that go into it. If you can stomach a fair amount of violence and gore, then you’ll appreciate what Sanctuary tries to do, which is smartly reintroduce sumo to a new generation.

It’s easy to see With Love and mistake it for a Hallmark special; both are filled with pretty people who spend the holidays looking for love. But where Hallmark tends to be simple and sappy, With Love is refreshingly complex and earnest. The characters, mostly Latino and queer, rarely sugarcoat their problems and desires, even though each episode ends on a relatively sweet note. 

In a joyous move, every one of them takes place during a different holiday too—Christmas, New Year, Valentine’s, Día de los Muertos. And every time, we delve deeper into the lives of our leads and witness the ways they take on universal problems with modern and diverse approaches. It’s breezy and at times raunchy, making it a fun companion for any holiday.

Misfortune (Mala fortuna) is a telenovela that doesn’t shy away from the genre’s goofy qualities. It’s predictable and a little bit ridiculous, but like most enjoyable soap operas, it knows how to draw you in and keep you invested in all the drama. Our protagonists are two peas in a pod: Julio and Victoria, ordinary people who seduce their way into scamming the ultra-rich family known as the Urquizas. Of course, their feelings (both for the family and for each other) get in the way of their schemes, but the resulting entanglement makes for a sexy and hilarious watch. 

A murder mystery with an absurdist comedic bent, Killer Coaster initially comes off as too much. It struggles to juggle different genres and poses many questions it doesn’t immediately answer. There are also too many elements—including warring families, star-crossed lovers, secret identities, and complicated pasts—that make the mystery of the Ghost Train Killer seem incidental, even though it is the show’s throughline, the main event that kickstarts the entire thing. But it’s easy to forgive all this whenever Alexandra Lamy does her magic onscreen. As the well-meaning but clumsy police officer Sandrine, Lamy is likable and hilarious, a clown with just enough heart to pull you into her antics. She soars even more when paired with real-life sister Audrey Lamy, who plays the carnival owner Yvanne—also good-hearted but even slower (and at times funnier) than Sandrine. Together, their amusing weirdness saves the show from loose ends and uneven tones. 

 As the drama’s dysfunctionally in-love leads, Coleman and Jackson-Cohen are compelling. Whether the scene demands rage or romance, they’re able to effectively dial it from a subtle one to an all-out ten. Sadly, the material they’re working with fails to match their energy. Lackluster direction makes their arguments more of a weak tug than an intense push and pull, while scant introspection and backstory fail to justify the murderous urges that Liv all of a sudden has. In fact, it’s this aspect of Wilderness that remains the weakest. It’s watchable as an infidelity drama, but not nearly as believable as a crime thriller. The violent scenes come out corny, if not unintentionally funny. There is a version of Wilderness that could’ve made it a spiritual successor to the much wilder and brasher Doctor Foster, but this, unfortunately, isn’t it. 

Art Deco, opium dealings, and cutting off tongues… China then is different from China now, but that short period of time before World War II still fascinates people with how different the country could have been. Tencent Picture took advantage of that fascination through their microdrama Provoke, mixing in a revenge plot that comes straight from the film noir popular at the time. Of course, there’s only so much plot points one can fit into less than 15-minute episodes, and because of this, the camera lingers a bit too long on the cast’s gorgeous faces in order to stretch out the story for 25 episodes. That being said, the whole production is so stunning to watch that fans of the genre might be willing to forgive that the story is spread too thin. Provoke might have been more cohesive as a movie, but it’s intriguing enough to binge as is after the end of a long work day.

As a spin-off of The Boys, Gen V returns to the same well of explicit, hyperviolent satire about seemingly benevolent superheroes—touching on many ideas that the franchise has already explored more strikingly before. This series’ first three episodes are at their least effective when they get hung up on the shock factor of it all, with its satire often appearing as “cool” as the thing that it aims to satirize. But when the show quiets down and finally focuses up on its handful of main characters, it finds fresh ground for commentary.

At its heart this is a story about how the education system can be so easily bought by wealthy stakeholders who care more about producing star graduates than actually helping young people excel and find a place in the world. These kids are also immediately much easier to root for than Billy Butcher and his antihero crew, as each of them gradually reveals the trauma they’re recovering from as a result of being experimented on and exploited. Gen V’s central mysteries are slow to develop so far, but just seeing how this school-slash-factory is run helps make up for the slower pace.

The selling point of the series Alphonse, apart from raunch and romance, is that it gets its talented lead Jean Dujardin to transform into a different character each time he meets with a different client. Sometimes, he’s a World War II soldier, other times, he’s part of the academic elite. Always, he’s the object of fantasy of Parisian women. His real self, however, the titular Alphonse, is a sad sack going through a midlife crisis. On paper, this sounds like a recipe for pure fun: a lost guy tries out different masks and costumes until he discovers his true self in the process. The execution, however, feels wonky and uneven, as if the series is unable to balance all the things it tries to be. To be clear, Dujardin is excellent as the chameleonic Alphonse and Charlotte Gainsbourg is arresting as his mercurial wife Margot. But there’s a murkiness and vagueness to the overall style, tone, and direction of the series that leaves you wanting more. It’s okay, but there’s a sense that it could’ve been great if it tighten its screws a bit more.

The first thing we learn about Dolores Roach is that she is a person of sensation and scandal, a masseuse who, as the newspaper clippings reveal, turned out to be a murderous cannibal serving human flesh to unwitting customers at a local eatery, a la Sweeney Todd. But the series is less about the horrors of the act and more about the woman behind the front. “I was never the blood-hungry sociopath people say I am,” Dolores claims early in the first episode. “I was just some chick in Washington Heights.” In an attempt to humanize Dolores, we’re made privy to the unforgiving circumstances surrounding her case, namely: the desperation of poverty, the relentlessness of discrimination, the brokenness of the criminal justice system, and the inevitability of gentrification, all of which play a crucial role in Dolores’ eventual descent into misdeed and madness. It’s an interesting idea, fleshing out her darkness in a comic tone and pitting it against systemic social problems, but sadly the show never pulls off the balance it needs to become an effective dark comedy. Maybe something was lost when it was adapted from a one-woman play to TV series, but it never really shakes off that amateur approach to telling its delicate story. The heavy-handed narration and the occasional gimmicks overshadow the horrific deaths that occur, and they don’t leave enough space for the story’s relevant themes to aerate and make a significant impact. It’s also not nearly as scandalous nor as sexy as it thinks it is, lacking passion both in its love and murder scenes. They come off scrubbed and squeaky, blunting what could have been, at the very least, a sharp murder thriller. 

If Special Ops: Lioness seems like one of the many muscly, male-targeted shows out there but, you know, girlified, that could be because it’s created by Taylor Sheridan, the mastermind behind such hypermasculine epics as Yellowstone, Tulsa King, and Mayor of Kingstown. Lioness could have been a chance for Sheridan to prove his versatility by showing us the female side of things for once; he could’ve explored the unique and complex situation female members of the military go through, and maybe jump into that rich discourse of intersectionality, but the show never really digs far beyond its spy thriller surface. Filled with soapy cliches, I’m-not-like-other-women takes, and what could only be product placements for the US Marines, Lioness doesn’t really seem like anything other than generic fare.