James R | On 06, Feb 2014

Last year, the world of TV production chalovefilmnged. Netflix introduced original content for the Internet streaming age, with David Fincher and Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards bagging Emmy awards and Golden Globes. Amazon, meanwhile, released a batch of pilots for original shows for its subscribers to vote on which should be made. As Frank Underwood returns to Netflix screens, Amazon are hitting back even bigger with a new range of 10 original TV show pilots, all of them available to stream on Amazon Prime Instant Video.

The last crop of tasters were primarily comedy shows – and the experiment in crowd-sourced decisions prompted two new series, Silicon Valley sitcom Betas and political satire Alpha House. The latter, by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, stars John Goodman.

Alpha House has now been released on Amazon Prime Instant Video – read our review here, or have your say on the 2014 line-up, which is already looking more ambitious.

Included in the group are two one-hour dramas, with X-Files creator Chris Carter bringing The After to the table, full of his trademark sci-fi and mystery. Bosch, meanwhile, based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling novels, is a noirish detective show starring Titus Welliver.

Three 30-minute comedy dramas are also on offer, with Mozart in the Jungle standing out as the saucy tale of the classical music world in New York, written by Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola and starring none other than Gael Garcia Bernal. Jeffrey Tambor stars in Transparent, a show about a dysfuntional Los Angeles family.

It’s a bold strategy from Amazon: while Netflix focus on crunching numbers in secret, calculating algorythms to work out which cross-section of genres hit the sweet spot, Amazon are taking that commission process and opening it up for the public. What audiences want, they get – and this second batch of pilots shows the company is confident in its content strategy.

Most exciting of all is that the decision-making is not just left up to the adults: children can vote for what shows they want to see on-demand too, with five pilots aimed at kids also released: The Jo B. and G. Raff Show, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, Hardboiled Eggheads, Wishenproof and Maker Shack Agency.

All 10 pilots are ready to watch right now on Amazon Prime Instant Video – and anyone can watch them, even non-subscribers.

To see the full collection, hit the button below.

Add to Watchlist