What's Noteworthy in August? A Lot.

Michael Douglas gets glittery

August has turned into an exceptional month for Amazon Prime. And while I don't want to keep harping on comparisons with Netflix (who's currently in my digital doghouse), the fact is, the quality of this month's new arrivals puts Netflix's spotty August list to shame. Whereas there were too few notable titles on that service to even bother listing, here on Prime it's all I can do to track everything. (Funnily enough, last month I had a similar urge to throw up my hands at Netflix—but it was over all the expiring titles.) At the same time, so many of Prime's new arrivals are exclusives, I've broken with my usual practice of labeling them PRIME ONLY and am noting instead those few exceptions that aren't exclusive.

HBO

So, where to begin? The most obvious headliners are the newly available HBO series, Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom: Seasons 1-2, which arrived towards the end of July, and today's debut of all eight seasons of Larry David's cringingly funny Curb Your Enthusiasm. These two high-profile shows will likely get plenty of visibility on the Amazon site, so I don't need to spend much time on them here except to say what a great coup the service's HBO deal continues to be.

If further proof were needed, there was also the late-July arrival of Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, a 2013 production meant to be the director's final theatrical film but, due to the skittishness of Hollywood's bean counters, was financed and released by HBO. Starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, this biopic of Liberace boasts not only a ridiculously high 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a passel of industry awards including Emmys for Outstanding Movie, Actor (Douglas), and Director. In other words, a prestige production if there ever was one—TV or otherwise.