So Amazon bought the rights to two series of its own. HBO hit it big by betting on a book series beloved by fans but too expensive, unwieldy, or otherwise unadaptable to do justice without complete commitment to a multiseason endeavor. Other projects are even more blatant about following the Thrones playbook to the letter. The ill-conceived Carnival Row may have had elements of high fantasy and an even higher budget, but it lacked much of a spark, including between its two leads. Still, Amazon’s most obvious attempts to make Thrones’ lightning strike twice are also its most literal-and least imaginative. Neither development is, on its own, the “next Game of Thrones,” but they’re steps in the right direction.
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(The show subverts its genre enough to win over skeptics but holds enough mass appeal to compete with Marvel and DC, not just comment on them.) And earlier this year, Amazon announced its plans to buy the studio MGM for more than $8 billion, a move that would bring global franchise James Bond into the fold-and the opportunity to launch satellites like a TV show along with it. With two seasons under its belt, superhero spoof The Boys is popular enough to earn a spinoff and a surprise Emmy nod for Outstanding Drama Series. Perhaps their productions should be, too.įour years on, the plan isn’t without its payoffs. ( Annette, the recently released French rock opera with a singing puppet baby, was one of theirs.) As a company, Amazon is nothing if not vast in scale. It wouldn’t be consistent for the Everything Store to specialize in lower-budget series with the look and feel of an independent film-though over the years, Amazon has acquired plenty of those, too. The goal was, on one level, almost redundant isn’t “the next Game of Thrones” just another term for “the next TV megahit,” and isn’t the objective of every TV show for as many people to watch it as possible? But for a service that won its first Emmys for a Jewish family dramedy about gender and sexual identity, the sorta-pivot made a certain kind of sense. The Prime Video streaming service may not be working off of Bezos’s specific agenda, but its latest effort-a show based on author Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, the first three episodes of which dropped last Friday-has a distinct whiff of programming by checklist.Īround the time Bezos outlined his storytelling strategy, he also reportedly issued a mandate for Prime Video’s next big milestone: to find the next Game of Thrones.
Not only was the anecdote an over-the-top example of higher-ups inserting themselves into an area well outside their expertise the mindset on display still seems to guide Amazon’s big-picture planning.
But the story still struck a nerve, and for good reason. Stone later clarified that Bezos had since stepped back from overseeing Amazon Studios so closely. All of these iconic shows have the same basic things in common.” He then went on to list, seemingly spontaneously, 12 aspects of a great series, including “moral choices,” “positive emotions,” “a compelling antagonist,” and “humor.” For a time, Bezos’s word became law, with executives required to submit spreadsheets explaining how each show fulfilled each criterion.
(Later that same year, Price resigned over allegations he had sexually harassed an executive producer on the show, which ultimately aired for four seasons.) Bezos, frustrated that The Man in the High Castle had not become a major hit, lamented that “this should not be that hard. In 2017, Stone reported, Bezos dressed down former Amazon Studios head Roy Price over the perceived failure of The Man in the High Castle, the dystopian drama adapted from the Philip K. But the book did produce a memorable-and illuminating-anecdote about corporate management of a creative enterprise. As the subtitle suggests, the book’s scope is much wider than the company’s entertainment arm, spanning from Alexa to Amazon Web Services to match the breadth of Bezos’s ambitions. Earlier this year, business reporter Brad Stone published Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.