Prime Video isn’t just one thing. For the last couple of years, Prime Video has been defined by TV critics and social commentators as the home of what has been termed “Dad TV.” The streamer found success with shows like Jack Ryan, Bosch, The Terminal List, Reacher, The Boys and more – shows with masculine, slightly older world views. The sorts of shows your dad probably would like.
But Prime Video has quietly been finding considerable success with TV shows and movies based around Young Adult fiction and they’re getting the word out.
“Right now, there seems to be this fantastic cultural convergence of YA book-to-screen adaptations and also a #BookTok community that has come together in the last year,” Hwei Loke, told Mediaweek. Loke is the head of Amazon Prime Video Australia and New Zealand and a passionate YA reader.
“There’s this super passionate, engaged, community-driven audience of YA fans, particularly Gen Z, but I’m not going to count out Millennials, because I’m one of them, that aren’t just watching the content. They’re not just reading the books – they’re watching it, reading it, remixing it, sharing it amongst their communities, and they’re building these enormous online communities,” she said.
In Sydney, Prime Video is staging Prime Book Club LIVE, an event celebrating some of its biggest global book-to-stream hits. It is an opportunity for fans to meet the authors of popular YA books that have been adapted by Prime Video, along with series stars. This includes best-selling author and showrunner for The Summer I Turned Pretty Jenny Han, along with series stars Lola Tung and Rain Spencer. Also appearing is Mercedes Ron, the best-selling author of the Culpable trilogy.
Culpables Saga creator Mercedes Ron and local digital creator Lucinda Price
This is an event being staged by the Australian Prime Video team specifically for Australian fans. It isn’t a roadshow travelling internationally. What prompted the team to stage the event?
“It’s about deepening engagement with an already very active fan community. For us, it was how do we bring our fans deeper engagement with the moments from these books that have been adapted to screens and get them to interact with the people who have brought those series to life? So, you know, who better than Jenny Han, Mercedes Ron, the actual authors of those books who are deeply involved in the screen adaptations and also the stars who bring to life on screen the stories that they love. It’s about connecting fan movements into in real life connections,” Loke said.
Despite the success with YA adaptions and the aforementioned “Dad TV” shows, Loke advises that anyone seeking to pitch a show to Prime Video should avoid chasing the trends and instead be interesting on its own terms.
“At the end of the day, what we’re looking for are stories that engage our audiences. We aren’t specifically looking at YA or what you would call the ‘Dad genre’. We’re open to stories that our audiences and our fans are going to get excited about. And that is the lens that we take when we look at commissioning,” Loke said.
The Prime Book Club LIVE event has already been deemed a success by the team at Prime, with all of the tickets snapped by within minutes of being made available. A media preview event last night was also seen as a huge success by those who attended. Loke is keen to stage further events to create a direct connection between the shows and movies on Prime Video and fans at home.
“We can see that there’s such a fantastic hunger from the community to have events like this. We’re committed to bringing events to Australian audiences that deepen their engagement that they’re able to have with our content, whether it’s through this event or through premieres or through screenings or through events, we want to continue that relationship with our fans for sure,” Loke said.
Pictured above: Lola Tung, Hwei Loke, Jenny Han, and Rain Spencer