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A scene from Bosch, now streaming on Amazon Instant Video |
In April 2013, Amazon stepped decidedly into the world of original television programming when it streamed over a dozen pilot episodes for free and asked viewers worldwide to vote on which among them should get picked up. Out of that great experiment in participatory democracy came two new series – the Silicon Valley comedy Betas and Gary Trudeau's political comedy Alpha House – which both premiered in November and were only available online for Amazon Prime subscribers. (Alpha House, starring John Goodman and Clark Johnson, turned into the surprise highlight of this past fall's TV season.) Now, less than a year later, Amazon's "pilot season" returns, stronger and more confident than before. Amazon's second year may offer fewer "prime time" pilots than before (two one-hour dramas, and three half-hour comedies), but the productions are more ambitious, and come with some genuinely high-profile talent both in front of the camera and behind it. We have Chris Carter's apocalyptic thriller The After, the well-crafted crime procedural Bosch (adapted from Michael Connelly's popular series of novels), Transparent with Arrested Development's Jeffrey Tambor, Mozart in the Jungle set in the cutthroat world of a New York philharmonic orchestra, and The Rebels, a more conventional comedy about a failing professional football franchise. While each of the pilots has something worthwhile, the two real gems are Bosch and Transparent, which are easily among the most polished and self-possessed new shows I've seen in a while.
Though I'm not entirely convinced that Amazon's "Help Us Decide" model is all that groundbreaking – ultimately, it all really comes down to a maxim TV executives have been following since Philo Farnsworth transmitted his first television signal: give the audience what they want – it is ingenious from a marketing and publicity perspective. In this YouTube and low-cost digital video era, Amazon is giving its audiences the feeling of an inside track to the still mysterious world of television programming. (Last year, one of Amazon's offerings included an animated episode that was still unfinished, storyboards and all.) And with that, the viewing public gets a crucial early buy-in to new shows that haven't even yet gone into production, making us root for "our" show to get picked up. It's not altogether different – psychologically at least, if not financially – from the Kickstarter model adopted last spring by Veronica Mars' Rob Thomas, and the result is much the same: free publicity and a pre-invested audience. Still, technological and business innovations aside, at the end of the day it's either good TV or not. And fortunately for Amazon, they have found some winners this year. No word has been given as to how many of the five shows Amazon can afford to produce, but based on last year, it's probably at least two and at most three. All of which means that some of us will no doubt be disappointed by the results. I recommend taking the time and checking them all out yourself and voting for your favourites, but if you don't feel like investing in the full three-and-a-half hours, here is my two cents on what's worth watching.
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Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch |
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Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent |
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Louise Monot in The After |
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Lola Kirke in Mozart in the Jungle |
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Natalie Zea in The Rebels |
Only time will tell for certain which of these five new series Amazon will pick up, but if we're lucky we'll see full seasons of Bosch and Transparent begin airing in the fall. (I also anticipate The After will also get the nod, purely because of the Chris Carter factor.) While the two series could not be more different, they both share a maturity that makes them utterly compelling television – which fortunately is also precisely what Amazon wants and needs. The goal here after all is to give people a reason to subscribe to an entirely new service by offering television they'll want to see now, and not to wait for an inevitable DVD release. (This is what HBO have been doing for over a decade, and what Netflix seems to have done by creating two of last year's most talked-about series, House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.) On those terms, Bosch and Transparent more than fit the bill.
NOTE: This piece was originally published on Critics at Large on February 23, 2014. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.