Addictive Prime Video crime series has fans calling it one of the best ever
Prime Video's Criminal hasn't aired a single episode yet. Its fans have had 20 years to make up their minds about it anyway.
Criminal arrives on Prime Video in January 2027, and the excitement isn't really about a trailer. The series adapts Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal, the crime comic that crime-comic readers have been calling one of the best in the medium since 2006. Prime Video dropped the first teaser on November 5, and the cast list alone did a lot of work: Charlie Hunnam, Adria Arjona, Luke Evans and Emilia Clarke.
Why fans already rank it so high
The comic has the trophy shelf to back up the hype. Criminal won the Eisner Award, the comics industry's top honor, for best new series in 2007, then won best limited series in 2012 for The Last of the Innocent and best new graphic album in 2019 for My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies. It started at Marvel's creator-owned Icon imprint, moved to Image Comics and has stayed creator-owned the whole time.
Fellow comics writer Brian K. Vaughan put the reputation in one line, quoted on Image Comics' reissue of the first volume.
"Brubaker and Phillips' books have always been about eight years ahead of their time."
— Brian K. Vaughan, writer of Y: The Last Man and Saga
The format is part of the appeal. Criminal is an anthology of crime stories set in one shared world, each built around different characters, and that's also why Prime is releasing it the way it is.
What the Prime Video series covers
Season 1 adapts the first two books as two four-episode stories, per ScreenCrush:
- Part 1, "Coward" (January 13): Leo Patterson (Hunnam), a thief who plans his jobs without guns, and his childhood friend Ricky Lawless (Gus Halper) are haunted by a murder from when they were kids and a heist that goes wrong. Arjona plays Greta, a car thief from Leo's past.
- Part 2, "Lawless" (January 27): Ricky's older brother Tracy (Evans), who chose the Army over prison 20 years earlier, comes home and has to face the family business. Clarke plays Mallory, Ricky's girlfriend.
Richard Jenkins, John Hawkes, Kadeem Hardison and Logan Browning round out the cast. Amazon ordered the series in January 2024, and it shot in Portland that year.
The creator says it's close to the books
Brubaker isn't just credited on this one. He wrote the first episode and co-runs the show with crime novelist Jordan Harper, and Phillips is an executive producer who drew new art for it, including the title sequence. Brubaker told readers of his newsletter that it's the biggest and hardest thing he's done in 20 years of working in television, Bleeding Cool reported.
"There are literally scenes you can compare one-to-one with the books."
— Ed Brubaker, co-creator and showrunner, in his newsletter
He also promised a few surprises for people who know the comics by heart, plus plenty of Easter eggs. It's been a long road: Brubaker said he had Criminal set up as a movie about 16 years ago, and it fell apart the way most Hollywood projects do.
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The hype so far
The teaser landed with exactly the reaction you'd expect from a cast like this. One fan summed it up, as Netflix Junkie collected:
"Hunnam, Arjona, Clarke, Evans — Criminal just stacked the January calendar."
— a fan on X, reacting to the teaser
Whether the show lives up to the books is a January question. Eight episodes split into two drops is short enough to binge in a weekend, and the comic has 20 years of fans who'll be checking the one-to-one scenes Brubaker promised.
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