20 Best Miniseries on Amazon Prime

Before Park Chan-wook adapted her novel Fingersmith in The Handmaiden, author Sarah Waters wrote Tipping the Velvet, her debut novel that painted the life of lesbian women in Victorian London. Surprisingly, this controversial novel was produced and broadcast by the BBC in 2002, sticking faithfully to the plot, with all the racy sex scenes and relaxed depiction of lesbian life that shocked the public at the time, but over the years, the miniseries has become known as the refreshing classic that shifted the way lesbians were depicted on screen. While primarily centered on white women, Tipping the Velvet changed the way Victorian sexuality was depicted, with the joy, sensuality, and happiness in Waters’ passionate narrative.

With immigration being a vastly different experience across race, gender, and origin country, it can be easy to dismiss Amazon Prime’s Expats as just another melodrama about the rich, especially with the controversies surrounding its production. There’s some truth to this– two of the three leads live in glamorous, high-rise apartments bigger and more expensive than the standard Hong Kong shoe-box– but the show is much more than that. It grapples with the identity that must be remade for the move. It empathizes with the unresolved loss that haunts the day-to-day life of both mother and caretaker. And on top of that, Lulu Wang portrays how this grief-stained lens can still be short-sighted, when directed to those in the margins. Expats is a revelation with its slow and steady multi-sided portraiture.

It takes Monsieur Spade some time to settle into its skin. The first few hours are dedicated to introducing as many side characters and backstories as possible, and though this could have been more elegantly executed, it eventually pays off. The main mystery, once you get to it, is layered and complex, and watching Spade physically and verbally spar with Philippe is its own kind of reward. Their curt but cutting dialogue harkens back to past noirs, and it’s a delight to see that tradition live on in the genre.

Everyone grows up learning about the theatric death of President Lincoln—while enjoying a play with his wife, the actor and Confederate soldier John Wilkes Booth shoots him straight in the head, dashes to the stage, and escapes into the wilderness before eventually getting caught. But most people tend to gloss over that last part when, in fact, Booth’s capture was a wild ride that involved the rabid participation of thousands of troops and civilians. Ironically, it united a nation that was still grappling with the loss brought by war. Through seven episodes, Manhunt zooms in on that moment in American history and closely follows the cat-and-mouse chase between Booth and Secretary of War Edward Stanton. It’s a powerfully performed piece, as one would expect from Emmy-winning actor Menzies, but the surrounding characters are just as colorful and impassioned. They capably bring life to a near-forgotten piece of history and make it feel just as urgent and important as the day it happened.

Domestic abuse is a delicate matter, and onscreen depictions always run the risk of being either too sensational or mopey. The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, thankfully, is neither. It sensitively and creatively tells the story of Alice and all the other survivors who June shelters on her flower farm. More than just decor, these flowers serve as a lifeline to the girls: not only do they grow and sell them to earn a living, but they’ve also made a special secret language out of them. Different blooms mean different things, and when you live in a world where your pain is systematically ignored, it makes sense to communicate in hiding. Granted, the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart can get overly dramatic at times. Some plotlines include hiding who the child’s real father is and fighting to get custody of said child. But it’s unfair to dismiss the series as mere melodrama. It’s doing important work by shedding light on the manifold ways women are mistreated, and it does so in a commendably original and artful way.

The Little Drummer Girl starts slow, but it’s hard to peel your eyes away from the screen when it finally kicks into gear in the third episode. Every frame is packed with style, for one, and Le Carre’s espionage maze reliably thrills for another. Paired with Park Chan-wook’s eye for detail, as seen in modern classics like Oldboy and The Handmaiden, and with Pugh’s all-in performance, The Little Drummer Girl feels a bit more premium than the usual spy thrillers on TV. The elephant in the room, of course, is that this is all set against the backdrop of the Israel-Palestine conflict, manifested here in back-and-forth terrorist and assassination attempts. In this aspect, the series can be quite toothless, though it accurately highlights the hypocrisy of armchair activists like Charlie. “All right, I’m superficial, I get it!” she claims when pressed about her conflicting politics.