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Tom's Guide
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Tom's Guide
3 best Prime Video miniseries you (probably) haven't seen
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. 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." Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. Watch "The Little Drummer Girl" now 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 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
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on the Edinburgh fringe: it's no joke – festivals need investment
At a press conference for the Sarajevo film festival in the early 1990s, its founder, the Bosnian director Haris Pašović, was asked why he set up such a festival during the war. His reply, he told the Los Angeles Times, was: 'Why the war during the film festival?' Sarajevo under siege is an extreme example, but the point is that arts festivals matter, especially during times of crisis. Covid, austerity and sponsorship issues have left even the most successful festivals in the UK struggling. This week Shona McCarthy, the outgoing chief executive of the Edinburgh festival fringe, argued that the fringe should be given the same support as major sporting events like the Olympics. This follows warnings from Nicola Benedetti, a classical violinist and director of the fringe's parent, the international festival, that its world-class status is threatened by funding cuts. It is a similar story for Edinburgh book festival. Like many of the UK's biggest literary festivals, it has been hit by the loss of sponsorship from the investment management company Baillie Gifford, over its links to companies involved in the fossil fuel industry and Israel. The Hay literary festival, dubbed 'the Woodstock of the mind' by Bill Clinton in 2001, is also under serious threat. Founded in 1947 in a spirit of postwar optimism, the Edinburgh fringe is the world's largest arts festival, selling 2.6m tickets last year. Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Eddie Izzard, Steve Coogan, Hannah Gadsby and Scotland's own Billy Connolly all started out here. In 1966, legend has it, a play titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by an unknown playwright was performed to an audience of one. More recently, spin-off TV hits include This is Going to Hurt, Baby Reindeer and Fleabag, whose creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, has said that 'the Edinburgh fringe changed my life'. The fact that the fringe, unlike most festivals, is not centrally curated or funded (each show is the responsibility of its producers) doesn't mean that it is without costs. Chaos was always part of its let's-put-on-a-show ethos, but it is not a sound business strategy. Today, performers can't afford to stay in Edinburgh, punters can't book tickets due to poor wifi, and it is difficult for everyone to get around. It is no joke. Large-scale events require infrastructure and investment. Glasgow is only hosting the Commonwealth Games again next year because the Australian state of Victoria pulled out, blaming rising costs. Edinburgh's new tourism tax, along with later trains and the use of university accommodation brought in by Ms McCarthy, will help the fringe in practical ways. But more needs to be done to save its spirit. Tony Lankester, who takes over next month, must ensure that it is not just hotels and Airbnb owners who are laughing all the way to the bank. Cultural institutions like the fringe are about more than making money and stars. In our age of disinformation, artificial intelligence and alienation, such gatherings of people, talent and ideas are more vital than ever. As the novelist Elif Shafak observed after the attack on Salman Rushdie as he walked on stage at an arts festival in New York in 2022, they are 'one of our last remaining democratic spaces' where one can both speak one's mind freely and hear someone else's story. Let's give them a sporting chance.
