After The Boys & Invincible, Prime Video Has Another Great Superhero Show

1 week ago 22

Published Jul 20, 2026, 9:00 AM 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.

With Bosch, Reacher, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Prime Video has become the home of “dad TV” — although Paramount+ is giving it a run for its money with the Yellowstone universe — and now, Amazon is coming for a different streaming crown. Prime is already the go-to place for action shows that appeal to middle-aged men, but it’s becoming the go-to place for subversive superhero shows, too.

Over the past two decades, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made superheroes the hottest commodity in Hollywood (and oversaturated the market and created “superhero fatigue”), and TV has struggled to keep up. Disney+ has expanded the MCU onto the small screen with wildly varying degrees of success (there are some gems, like Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel, but they’re lost in a sea of mediocre content). Netflix had its own little Marvel universe with Daredevil and co., but that got shuttered by a corporate merger, and HBO has given us some of the best comic book adaptations in recent memory with Watchmen and The Penguin.

Before this summer, Prime already had two of the best superhero shows on the air. The Boys and Invincible are both dark, violent superhero stories that drastically subvert the usual tropes of American comic books with an evil Superman and a desperate resistance trying to stop them. These shows told that story in very different, equally engaging ways, and made Amazon’s streaming library the perfect antidote to the MCU’s increasingly formulaic output.

On May 27, Prime dropped all eight episodes of its weird little Spider-Man spinoff, Spider-Noir. The show seemed like a gimmick at first, giving Nicolas Cage’s webslinging private detective from the Spider-Verse movies his own live-action TV series, but it turned out to be one of the best new shows of the year. It solidified Prime Video as the home of great superhero shows.

Spider-Noir Is The Best Superhero Show On Prime Video

Ben Reilly crouching in front of a stained glasse window in Spider-Noir

Not only did Spider-Noir solidify Prime as the go-to place for great superhero shows; it might be the streamer’s best superhero show yet. The Boys and Invincible are both incredible in their own ways, but Spider-Noir took it to another level.

The Boys started out as a delightfully gruesome satire of big superhero universes, but it ended up becoming one. After three stellar seasons, The Boys’ season 3 finale arrived as an ominous warning sign that the writers didn’t know where the story was going, and they were just dragging it out. Seasons 4 and 5 both had their moments — Homelander’s ending, in particular, was extremely satisfying — but they never reached the subversive, game-changing heights of seasons 1 and 2 (despite the best efforts of Antony Starr and Karl Urban). Invincible has been a lot more consistent than The Boys, but Spider-Noir blew it out of the water.

The mashup of old-school detective noir and webslinging superhero action feels like a gimmick in the first couple of episodes, but the series doesn’t use that style as a crutch; it’s just a framework for the actual narrative. Spider-Noir isn’t just a fascinating experiment in genre deconstruction; it’s also a worthwhile story, about a bitter, jaded alcoholic at the end of his road, reluctantly being pulled back into action and finding a new lease on life in the process. Cage is doing some of the best work of his career as Ben Reilly. His portrayal of a hard-boozing private eye is pure Bogart, and his arachnid physicality makes “The Spider” just as zany and unsettling as the Longlegs killer.

Spider-Noir is the best Spider-Man show since Spectacular Spider-Man, and one of the best comic book adaptations ever made. Marvel Studios should be taking notes from Prime, because they need to be taking big swings like this.