With the warm-weather season upon us, nobody wants to spend all of those precious sun-filled hours watching season after season of a TV show, which is where a miniseries comes in.
Compact and concentrated, a miniseries or limited series manages to grip you with only a handful of episodes, still delivering compelling storylines and plenty of drama with far less screentime than a traditional television serial.
And Prime Video has plenty of great miniseries on offer, so much so that you might have missed some of these titles during your browsing due to the sheer scope of the streaming service’s library.
Whether you’re in the mood for a British spy drama starring Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgård or a police procedural led by Alexander’s dad, Stellan Skarsgård, here are three Prime Video miniseries that you might have overlooked the first time around but should add to your watch list ASAP.
‘The Little Drummer Girl’
THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL Trailer (2018) Park Chan-Wook Series – YouTube
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Before she was starring in mega-hit movies like “Thunderbolts,” “Dune: Part Two” and “Oppenheimer” and becoming an Academy Award nominee for” Little Women,” Florence Pugh was leading this 2018 limited series as Charmian “Charlie” Ross, a radical left-wing English actress in the late 1970s who gets sucked into the high-stakes world of international espionage.
While in Greece, Charlie meets a mysterious man named Gadi Becker (Alexander Skarsgård), who ends up being an undercover Mossad agent sent by Israeli spymaster Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) to recruit the actress as an Israeli secret agent to take down an assassin.
The six-episode drama drummed up a stellar 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critical consensus praises: “‘The Little Drummer Girl’ marches to a steady beat of assured plotting, extraordinary art direction, and a uniformly terrific cast that makes the show’s smolderingly slow burn pace bearable.”
Watch “The Little Drummer Girl” now
‘This Is Going to Hurt’
This Is Going To Hurt | Trailer – BBC – YouTube
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Created by Adam Kay and based on his memoir of the same name, this hilarious and heartfelt BBC medical miniseries focuses on the lives of a group of junior doctors working on an obstetrics and gynecology ward in a National Health Service hospital.
With a cast led by Ben Whishaw (“Black Doves”) and Ambika Mod (“One Day”), the seven-episode series profiles their professional and personal lives and explores the emotional effects of working in a stressful work environment.
The 2022 series was widely praised by critics, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting a 95% approval rating and consensus singling out Ben Whishaw’s” live-wire performance of an exhausted doctor” which “powers ‘This is Going to Hurt,’ a smart drama full of humor and pain.
Watch “This is Going to Hurt” now
‘River’
RIVER 2015 Official Trailer – YouTube
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In this 2015 British procedural, Stellan Skarsgård stars as Detective Inspector John River, a brilliant but brooding Swedish-born police officer who is haunted by visions of his recently murdered colleague, Detective Sergeant Jackie “Stevie” Stevenson (Nicola Walker). He struggles with the loss whilst investigating Stevenson’s murder, all while battling his own inner demons and the scrutiny of his superiors.
Across six installments, the gripping thriller becomes “more than just crime drama,” wrote Sam Wollaston in The Guardian: “It’s about personal tragedy, demons; it’s a study of loss and grief (which it shares with the greatest Nordic noir of them all: the first series of ‘The Killing’). It’s also a study of that — killing — and why people do it.” The crime drama miniseries boasts a perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Watch “River” now
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