Prime Video Is The Best Home For Fantasy Fans

Published Jul 17, 2026, 5:39 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. A decade-and-a-half ago, HBO brought fantasy back into the mainstream with Game of Thrones. Based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Game of Thrones used a typical Tolkienesque medieval fantasy setting to tell deeply human, universally relatable stories of power and love and betrayal. The success of Game of Thrones led to a wave of fantasy shows, as every network and streaming service scoured bookshelves in search of the next Song of Ice and Fire, but none of them proved to be as lucrative as Game of Thrones itself. Even after Game of Thrones disappointed with its final season, the franchise has continued to thrive. House of the Dragon has kept the sprawling epic saga going with another bitter feud over the Iron Throne, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms subverted everyone’s expectations with a refreshingly intimate, small-scale, low-stakes, character-focused adventure. The Game of Thrones franchise is still going strong, and HBO is about to premiere its ambitious readaptation of the entire Harry Potter series with a first season based on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone this Christmas. You’d think HBO would be the place to go for fantasy fans, in the way that Apple TV is the home of great sci-fi shows (Severance, Pluribus, For All Mankind, etc.). But HBO is just going to keep churning out Game of Thrones spinoffs, and it’ll spend the next seven years adapting seven books that they already got right the first time. It just feels like we keep doing the same things over and over again, and that a post-Game of Thrones, post-Last of Us HBO is too busy focusing on blockbuster spectacle and recognizable I.P. to get back to the heyday of The Sopranos and The Wire. If you’re a fan of high fantasy, Prime Video’s Critical Role universe is probably more interesting than more Game of Thrones spinoffs. Amazon's Critical Role Universe Is More Interesting For Fantasy Fans Than Endless Game Of Thrones Spinoffs HBO has the biggest fantasy universe on TV with Game of Thrones, but Amazon has a great one, too. Prime Video is technically in the Tolkien business, with the billion-dollar Lord of the Rings series The Rings of Power, but it’s not even close to being the streamer’s best fantasy show. That honor goes to The Legend of Vox Machina, an animated series based on the first campaign of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role. Critical Role is a creator-owned streaming show that sees a bunch of prolific voice actors from gaming and animation (Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson, Matthew Mercer, Travis Willingham — if you’ve ever played a video game, you’ll recognize their voices) getting together to play D&D. It’s not scripted; it’s an actual D&D campaign, and it proved to be so compelling that it was adapted into a cartoon for Prime Video. The Legend of Vox Machina has been on the air for four brilliant seasons, and it’s been renewed for a fifth and final season to complete the campaign. But that’s not all; a spinoff series based on Critical Role’s second campaign, The Mighty Nein, already premiered in 2025, so it’ll be there to pick up the slack when the flagship show ends. There are hundreds of episodes of Critical Role for animated adaptations to draw on, and the show is still going, so the Critical Role universe could eventually become even bigger than the Game of Thrones universe. While A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was a breath of fresh air that carved out its own niche, House of the Dragon is still just trying to replicate something that worked a decade ago in Game of Thrones. The Critical Role campaigns are much more imaginative, because they’re being pulled from their cast’s collective imagination in real time.