At Amazon’s Prime Video, the push to find a hit show that would define the streaming service for viewers came from the very top. Prime had critical darlings like “Fleabag” and popular series like “The Boys,” but founder Jeff Bezos wanted something bigger, something that all of America would watch one night a week and talk about the other six.
As the company more than doubled its spending on original TV content between 2016 and 2019, Bezos gave his team of executives a simple directive: “I want my ‘Game of Thrones.’”
Prime Video’s content budget hit $16.6 billion in 2022, and this year, it’s