The proliferation of streaming services has made the task of deciding which ones to actually subscribe to harder than ever. There’s Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Max, and a dozen others, and each one comes with its own price tag and its own library of content.
Although it’s definitely more niche than many of the heavy hitters, AMC Plus is well worth your subscription. In addition to a great movie library, the streaming service also has a library of TV shows that includes several of the best ever made. Mad Men was an awards player for almost a decade, and it’s just one of the shows on this list.
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I love AMC Plus primarily because of this TV library. Here are some great shows to get you started:
Mad Men (2007)
7 Seasons
Genre
Drama
Stars
Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser
Created by
Matthew Weiner
Watch on amc-plus
One of the best shows ever made, Mad Men follows the employees of a New York City advertising agency in the 1950s and ’60s. As basic as that premise might sound, the show becomes both a reflection of what it’s like to live through history and an examination of a few of the best characters in TV history. Lasting a total of seven seasons, the show managed to turn a workplace drama into a genuine exploration of identity, culture, and gender, all while being consistently entertaining. On top of all that, we got star-making turns from Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss.
Hannibal (2013)
3 Seasons
Genre
Drama, Crime
Stars
Mads Mikkelsen, Hugh Dancy, Laurence Fishburne
Created by
Bryan Fuller
Watch on amc-plus
Brilliant, weird, and sometimes gruesome, Hannibal tells the story of the friendship between FBI profiler and psychiatrist William Graham. What starts out as a fairly normal procedural quickly morphs into something much stranger, even as the show winds its way through the Thomas Harris books on which it’s based. Featuring a delectable central performance from Mads Mikkelson and great work from the broader ensemble, Hannibal was art television at its finest, and the fact that it ran for three seasons still feels like a miracle.
Interview with the Vampire (2022)
3 Seasons
Genre
Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Stars
Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, Assad Zaman
Created by
Rolin Jones
Watch on amc-plus
Adapted from the Anne Rice novel that also became a camp classic of ’90s cinema, this version of Interview With the Vampire knows how to marry the seduction of the novel with its campier elements even better than the movie. The series follows a vampire who tells his life story to a journalist, beginning in 19th-century New Orleans. Because the series has much more runway than the movie, we’re allowed plenty of time to actually bask in the details of this world, and enjoy watching the core actors, many of them vampires, bounce off one another.
The Walking Dead (2010)
11 Seasons
Genre
Action & Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Stars
Lauren Cohan, Norman Reedus, Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Created by
Frank Darabont
Watch on Amazon
Perhaps the biggest show in the history of AMC, The Walking Dead is a pretty straightforward story about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. What it lacks an originality, though, the series makes up for in its sheer brutality and in scale. Although the success of the show’s storytelling waxed and waned over the course of its run, the committed performances of its core actors, as well as a willingness to tell big, sweeping stories, is something that it can keep coming back to time and time again.
Halt and Catch Fire (2014)
4 Seasons
Genre
Drama
Stars
Lee Pace, Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis
Created by
Christopher Cantwell, Christopher C. Rogers
Watch on amc-plus
Halt and Catch Fire started as a riff on Mad Men but quickly became something entirely its own. The series follows computer programmers working in Texas in the 1980s as they innovate and develop new technologies in parallel with the real computational revolution. The show only got better as it went, in particular, because it began to focus more on its female characters. Although it never gained the widespread audience it probably should have, the show was nonetheless critically beloved by the end of its run.
Better Call Saul (2015)
6 Seasons
Genre
Crime, Drama
Stars
Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Rhea Seehorn
Created by
Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould
Watch on amc-plus
Better Call Saul is a Breaking Bad prequel, but it’s also so much more than that. The series follows Saul Goodman in the years before he became the scheming, amoral lawyer we know him to be in Breaking Bad. What’s perhaps surprising about this show is that, although it could have been a pure comedy, it ended up feeling like a grand tragedy about a fundamentally decent person who falls victim to his worse instincts time and time again. By the end, you’ll be both amazed and heartbroken, in part thanks to Bob Odenkirk’s remarkable central performance.
The Terror (2018)
2 Seasons
Genre
Mystery, Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Stars
George Takei, Kiki Sukezane, Shingo Usami
Created by
Edward Berger
This anthology series is one of the more underseen shows on AMC, and deserves a much bigger audience. Each season is historical fiction set at a different point in world history, and follows a group of people dealing with real-world hardships even as they begin to suspect there’s something supernatural afoot. In its first season, the series focused on the crew of a ship that had been stranded in the arctic in the 19th century, while in the second it was set in Japanese internment camps. These divergent stories have very different ideas, but both are well worth checking out.
Image: https://www.amcplus.com/shows/the-terror–1002256
Rectify (2013)
4 Seasons
Genre
Crime, Drama
Stars
Aden Young, Abigail Spencer, Adelaide Clemens
Created by
Ray McKinnon
Watch on amc-plus
Telling the story of a man who is released from prison after DNA evidence exonerates him for a heinous crime, Rectify is a show about forgiveness, and about whether you can ever really recover from that kind of mistake. Although it always had a small audience, Rectify was one of the most acclaimed shows on television, in part because it seems to understand the subtle ways a crime like this might ripple out into a community and a family. There are few shows like Rectify, and we’d be better off if there were more.
