The Five Best Comedies to Watch on Prime Video Right Now
If you’re subscribed to Amazon Prime, either for their streaming video content or because you want to be able to buy batteries and/or dinosaur-based erotica from the comfort of your own home at any hour of the day, that means you have access to a number of side-splitting movies and TV shows. To help guide you through this vast terrain of content, full of treacherous pitfalls (i.e., Jeff Dunham specials), here are some recommendations for great comedies you can watch on Prime Video…
The Brady Bunch Movie
At first, The Brady Bunch Movie sounded like a nostalgia-heavy cash-grab aimed squarely at Boomers — but it turned out to be surprisingly savvy and hilarious. Instead of just remaking the show, the movie finds the titular family’s brand of 1960s network-friendly kitsch transposed into the 1990s. This parodic take paved the way for future tongue-in-cheek retro TV adaptations like Starsky & Hutch and 21 Jump Street. Gary Cole and Shelley Long are national treasures.
Peter Bogdanovich, who died a year ago this week, followed up the farcical What’s Up, Doc? with the charming Paper Moon, starring Ryan O’Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum O’Neal as father-daughter con artists. O’Neal became the youngest person ever to win an Oscar thanks to this movie, which also co-stars the never-not-great Madeline Kahn. And we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out the uncredited contributions of the late Polly Platt.
There have been no bad versions of The Tick, but sadly Amazon’s 2016 live-action adaptation, starring Peter Serafinowicz and Griffin Newman, was canceled after just two seasons, presumably because their executives hate joy. But at least it’s still available to stream, and if you haven’t seen it, The Tick is a ton of fun — incidentally, the 2001 live-action Tick series is also great, and apparently, it’s on YouTube.
While not making as big a splash as their previous collaboration, Obvious Child, its director Gillian Robespierre and star Jenny Slate re-teamed for 2017’s underrated Landline, an indie comedy period piece set in the distant era of 1995. Essentially it’s about two sisters trying to unravel a mystery involving their father’s secret affair as they grapple with their own personal problems.
Sure, a lot of you have probably seen Fleabag by now, considering that the show has collected more awards trophies than Meryl Streep’s bathroom shelf. But there’s really no bad time to revisit future Indiana Jones sidekick Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s perfect series about grief, sex, guinea pigs and the abject frustration that can be caused by clerical celibacy.
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