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It’s a little strange to admit, but I find a lot of shows just by letting my Fire Stick go to sleep for a bit. When you do that, your television gets to enjoy a screensaver-like montage of varied shows and movies. I assume this is some line on some spreadsheet of ad offerings somewhere, some box the new After movie has ticked, along with Red, White, and Royal Blue, The Winter King, and now Billy the Kid. The latter two I doubt I would have found without this strange but effective advertising strategy because they run on MGM+, which is what exactly? And more to the point, what is going on there that it is producing such good original shows?

As it turns out, MGM+ is, like most things you know, love, and use daily, Amazon. It began its life as Epix, a small streaming channel that most people used as an add-on to another service, such as Amazon. It was launched in the U.S. in 2009 and eventually became part of an overall deal Amazon made with MGM in 2022. It was rebranded as MGM+ in January of 2023 in an attempt to reintroduce the storied MGM name into this generation’s consciousness. Leo the lion still roars, though he now does it in 3D, and their content library consists of movies and TV shows that feel, to misquote Harry Styles, like movies and tv. There’s a section on the homepage called “The Best of MGM,” which seems to be Dances with Wolves, Legally Blonde, Robocop, and The Magnificent Seven. I don’t know about you, but that certainly feels like the best of something.

What you may know, and may even subscribe to the service for, is Bond. MGM has the rights to all the Bond films, from the nihilist fuckboy fun of Sean Connery to the self-flagellating baby blues of Daniel Craig. Whoever takes up the mantle next, be it Aaron Taylor-Johnson (too muscley! Does he even fit in a suit?) or Lashana Lynch (they’re far too chicken), or Idris Elba (time ever marches forward), eventually their films will end up here, in a section imaginably titled “Bond, James Bond.” I have always loved Bond movies; I used to watch the Thanksgiving marathon every year on Spike TV when I was way too young for them. One could argue that this is MGM+’s greatest property and most reliable draw, but due to that whole Amazon purchase thing, most of these movies are also just available with a Prime subscription. What would cause you to plump for this particular, small, mostly unnoticed streaming service too? Is it, in the words of the first “People also ask” question on Google, worth the price ($5.99 a month)?

For me (and likely almost no one else), the answer to that lies less in the content library than in the new shows. Studios are hungry for people to watch what they make. With very few exceptions, they will prostrate themselves before you and beg for you watch the latest Jennifer Lawrence comedy. They will hand you the sixth chapter of an ongoing horror series with a flourish. It isn’t exactly hard to watch most things these days, but movies are especially easy to access. Maybe you wait a month once they’re out of theatres before Netflix or Amazon or Max lets you see them, maybe you even pay $2.99 to rent After Everything if you’re impatient and insane. But the friction is barely there. For interesting television, though, that isn’t the case. There’s still a lot that’s easy to access. Netflix will forever shove gourmet cheeseburgers at you, especially if you’re willing to turn on the subtitles or watch 30-ish women with excellent lip filler sell luxury real estate in California. But good, original, different television? I’m lucky to find two shows per streaming service per year that meet that standard. So, I repeat, what is going on over at MGM+?

Without meaning to, I’ve watched six MGM+ originals: Britannia, A Spy Among Friends, Chapelwaite, From, Billy the Kid, and The Winter King. These are probably the six most heavily promoted shows on the service and they fall roughly into three overlapping categories: gritty historical epics, genuinely original horror, and shows about what it means to be British. It’s easy to see what the people up top are trying to do with this lineup; they want to get people who are already there for Bond or other “old” movies to stay for the original stuff. These shows seem to skew male in terms of their target audience; the violence is gratuitous and the men are manly and tortured less in a mid-tier dark romance novel way and more in a Saving Private Ryan way. You’ve got Adrien Brody here. You’ve got David Morrissey. You’ve got Iain De Caestecker after an extensive conditioning routine.

There’s nothing here I would necessarily call “prestige,” as useless a term as that is rapidly becoming, potentially with A Spy Among Friends as the exception. But these are mainly genre plays: a Roman empire epic, a tense spy thriller (which is mainly a two-hander in one room, but still), a Lost-esque puzzle box horror, a Western, and a King Arthur epic. We’re really only missing a contemporary detective show, potentially set in Iceland, and a medical show with a lot of gratuitous sex in broom closets. Which is all to say, these are smart plays. The people up there greenlighting new shows have finally figured out that if you want a bunch of people to watch your show, genre shows are what the people want. People want romance and epics and mysteries. They want characters they can sit with for a long while, over multiple seasons. So good for MGM+ execs for realizing this 3-4 years ago and greenlighting a bunch of genre shows. But it’s hard to see how MGM+ gets over the one essential problem of our streaming age: to get people to watch your shows, you first have to get people to subscribe to your streaming service. MGM+ is available through a lot of cable packages, which is why they have said they reach anywhere between 80 and 150 million homes (um… sure), but the cable bundle isn’t long for this world. At least, not the traditional kind of cable bundle. And younger demos (which is the demo that everyone wants) cut the cord long long ago.

Finding shows like these is hard. It’s part of why I think this blog is something of a success; I do the snuffling around so you don’t have to. I often get asked how I find so many interesting shows to recommend but the answer isn’t that I’ve found some incredible hack or that I borrow Hermione’s time turner. It’s just a lot of work. I subscribe to a truly astounding number of streaming services. I have a VPN so that I can watch British shows before they come out in the U.S. I have Google alerts set to notify me whenever a new trailer drops. I read the Hollywood Reporter God help me! Martyr that I am, I do it for me as much as I do it for you. I love finding a show no one has seemingly ever heard of and getting other people to check it out, but we have to be honest with ourselves that this is not a sustainable model for doing television. MGM+ should not exist as a standalone service. Neither should 85% of the other ones. I bet Paramount+ could disappear tomorrow and you would never notice. Do you watch Acorn? Do you find something to love in the AMC+ library? Netflix is already re-stripping many of these streaming services of their most interesting content; Max, for example, has decided to give Sex and the City to Netflix, meaning one of the most recognizable parts of the OG HBO brand is no longer going to be watched on an HBO-owned app. We are on the precipice of total streaming collapse and honestly, I hope it comes sooner rather than later. It’s nice to find hidden gems, but the friction involved cannot be doing these shows any favors. Any one of the shows I mentioned above would have likely led the Netflix rankings for weeks, had it been sold there instead of where it now languishes. Given enough time, that’s where they will probably all end up.

MGM+ is a quaint little artifact of a brief, strange time in our viewing lives. I encourage you to check it out, but do it the smart way: get that free trial, binge for a week, then let it go back into the murky swirling depths of the streaming swamp. I’ll let you know what you’re missing.

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