Amazon Prime: The best of the box sets

(Image credit: Amazon Prime)

By The Week Staff

last updated 21 April 2016

Amazon Prime: Best box sets to watch in 2017

13 March

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Elvis Presley's granddaughter Riley Keough stars in this serialisation of Steven Soderbergh's 2009 film of the same name. Dark, gripping and occasionally funny, The Girlfriend Experience focuses on apparently cool and confident law student Christine (Keough), who is persuaded by her friend to join an escort agency. But she soon discovers that moonlighting as an escort is not what she imagined, while also uncovering a conspiracy at the law firm where she works by day.

Hollywood "fixer" Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) can sort out the problems of the stars, from demanding groupies to drug issues and inconvenient deaths, but his talents meet their match when it comes to his own troublesome family, especially when his dad is released from prison and the FBI are on his trail. As well as Schreiber, Ray Donovan features a great ensemble cast, including Jon Voight as his bad-to-the-bone father and Eddie Marsan as his troubled boxer brother.

Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) sits on Death Row for a crime he did not commit, but he isn't taking his fate lying down and together with his engineer brother, plots an ingenious escape. The premise is simple, but the tension is hard to match, even if it drops off a little in later seasons. Catch up on the story now in preparation for the series revival, Prison Break: Resurrection, due out in the UK in April.

Hoist the skull and crossbones and shiver your timbers, this swashbuckling action series was written as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic pirate tale Treasure Island. Set on New Providence Island two decades before the novel, Black Sails follows fearsome Captain Flint's attempts to nab a Spanish galleon loaded with gold while he and his crew come under increasing pressure from the authorities. Die Another Day villain Toby Stephens stars as the pirate chief.

One of the most popular of Amazon's original series, this dystopian alternative reality drama is based on a novel from cyber-punk writer Philip K Dick. It imagines a world where Nazi Germany has won World War II and taken global control in alliance with the Japanese. Set in an alternative 1962, the story focuses on a young woman called Juliana Crain, who gets mixed up in the resistance when her sister is killed after passing over film reel depicting a world where the Allies won the conflict. Stars Alexa Davalos, Rupert Evans, Luke Kleintank and Rufus Sewell.

This old-school but still satisfying police detective series is based on Michael Connelly's best-selling series of novels featuring detective Harry Bosch. Titus Welliver plays the title role, a divorced, streetwise LA detective with a tragic past. The series was created by Eric Overmyer, part of The Wire alumni - and one of the pleasures is spotting actors from that series, including Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick.

This US hit was a rare network television series to explore darker political themes. The hacker thriller focuses on Elliot (Rami Malek), a troubled, anti-social programmer who works as a hi-tech security consultant by day and as a lone-wolf hacker at night. Elliot's life gets more complicated when he is approached by the mysterious leader of an underground activist group (Christian Slater), who want his help to bring down corporate America - including the firm Elliot works for.

Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development) is the undisputed star of this comedy drama about a college professor in his sixties who tells his family he has always identified as a woman. His revelation pitches the lives of his adult children into turmoil as they try to come to terms with their own complex personal struggles. By turns funny, moving and shocking, the show has been awarded two Golden Globes and an Emmy.

Drawing on similar quasi-documentary techniques to The Office, Parks and Recreation creates its own phenomenally successful comedy niche thanks to the brilliant Amy Poehler. The show follows the goings on at an Indiana Parks and Recreation Department, where Leslie Knope (Poehler), a perky mid-ranking bureaucrat, tries to spruce up her town and boost her career with a series of well-meaning projects that inevitably become bogged down in red tape and office politics.

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Amazon Prime: Best box sets to watch in 2017

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