The Amazon documentary series This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy is entertaining and informative, but not comprehensive, says Dan Slevin.
Compared to Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video content gets a hard time from some critics on RNZ and that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
Netflix has the brand power, that’s for sure. It also has apps that work consistently on multiple platforms (over 160 different devices I’m told). And it has managed to create a global infrastructure for marketing and publicity that ensures subscribers and media know what they are releasing and when.
Oh… Now I get it. Prime hasn’t quite managed to deliver on any of that yet. But that doesn’t mean that it has to be that way forever.
Amazon is the biggest company in the world and is taking its streaming service seriously by making significant purchases of new films on the festival circuit and, unlike Netflix, their platform has an excellent selection of films from before 2010.
They have been investing heavily in (a few) popular series like Jack Ryan, The Man in the High Castle and the Emmy-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – it’s only about 5% the size of Netflix but still worth investigating.
Let's get real: when you are talking about two of the biggest companies that have ever existed on the face of the earth, there is no such thing as an ‘underdog’.
You may not have heard about This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy, but I was attracted to it for a few reasons.
It's hosted by Indian-American actor Kal Penn, most famous (as he keeps reminding us) for the Harold and Kumar series, and less famous for retiring from acting in 2008 so he could take a job in Obama's White House.
Kal Penn, in trademark primary tracksuit, presents This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy. Photo: Amazon
This Giant Beast is an eight-part documentary series about the various ways that finance and the flow of money affects our lives.
The show makes some bold – and unsupported – claims about how extensive its investigation is, but the topics chosen are all-important and fascinating: money laundering, cryptocurrencies and the global importance of rubber.
The series is produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Productions, which means that the tone of each episode is just like the celebrity-explanations of economics or politics in McKay’s films The Big Short and Vice.
Having read a few reviews of those films, I sense this might be a deal-breaker for some viewers.
Watching This Giant Beast, it can feel like you are being incessantly talked down to by comedians but – at the same time – these topics are complicated and potentially very boring. And this show is very rarely boring.
Photo: Amazon
Penn is an engaging and self-deprecating host and the production has spent a great deal of those fabled Amazon mega-dollars on travel – he shows up in remote parts of Malaysia, Thailand and India as well the more predictable locations like San Francisco, London, Singapore and Frankfurt.
His guests are often unusual characters, rather than great communicators, which puts a lot of pressure on Penn to carry the entertainment and education and he’s good value throughout.
My only complaint about the show – which my wife and I breezed through in two or three nights – is that it skirts around the edges of economics rather than dealing with the problematic guts of the whole thing.
For example, there's no examination of the role of giant online retailers in the changes we see in our high streets, but maybe that would be biting the hand that feeds it.
Anyway, there are plenty of potential subjects for the inevitable season two. We’ll be watching.
This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy is streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.
Kal Penn goes for a ride in a monster truck in This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy. Photo: Amazon
