Amazon Prime's Trivia Section Sets It Apart From Every Other Streamer

Take that, Netflix.
TV Screen with the Prime Video logo and trivia pop up bar

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Like many people, I spent all of last weekend binge-watching Hunters, the new Amazon Prime show starring Al Pacino as a Nazi hunter—it is, after all, quite cathartic in these trying times to watch Nazis get obliterated. In the first episode, a Jewish teen named Jonah (Logan Lerman) witnesses the murder of his grandmother in their living room. When the police prove to be unhelpful in uncovering the killer, he takes it upon himself to enact his own form of justice, deducing the murderer's identity through the minimal clues at his disposal. At one point, Jonah flips through a phone book to figure out the murderer’s workplace, and it was at this moment that I paused to grab some food. But the snack had to wait, since something truly outrageous on screen had caught my eye. A piece of information popped up on screen to accompany the open book: “Before the invention of the internet, encyclopedic listings of telephone numbers called “Yellow Pages” were extremely popular and commonly used.”

Not to get all Old Man Yells at Cloud about this, but... who doesn’t know what a phone book is? Just picture it: someone at Amazon HQ reviewed this scene and decided that a phone book was ancient enough to be worthy of extra historical context. What is the intended age demographic for this show if there needs to be an explanation of the Yellow Pages? If this is deemed worthy trivia, where is the line? Seriously… am I really that old?

If you haven’t used Amazon’s streaming service, you might not be familiar with its trivia feature. When you pause an Amazon Original, a load of information instantly appears on screen. There are links to biographies of every actor on screen at that freeze-framed moment. If there is a song playing, it will let you know what it is. And with Amazon Originals, this feature (known as X-Ray) provides bonus content. (Hunters, for example, has extra videos that give more historical context.) I have to give it to Amazon, X-Ray is fascinating, and to be honest, kind of genius. No more sitting in agonizing frustration while you try to place an actor you’re sure you saw in a movie one time. And no more holding your phone up awkwardly to the TV while Shazam tries to name the song that you’ll totally listen to later but never will. Amazon Prime does the work for you. I know this feature isn’t new—X-Ray has been a part of Prime Video for years—but as the streamer picks up steam with its original programming, more people (like me!) are bound to discover its plentitudes.

This whole Hunters trivia discovery kicked off a weekend-long obsession with the Prime feature. Along with the 10 one hour-long episodes I was watching (which is already too long, by the way), I wasted at least an extra 10 minutes per episode just by pausing every two minutes to read trivia. If anything remotely esoteric was happening, I expected a fact to accompany it. I know that a scene set in South America was actually filmed in Irvington, New York, and that “Gonef” is Yiddish for thief. My brain was a sponge for useless information—I just had to know everything. And ultimately, what reading a bunch of facts about Hunters did was force me to pay attention to the show in a way that rarely happens when you’re mindlessly binge-watching.

Amazon’s original content might still be just behind that of its competitors, but what Netflix is sorely lacking is a trivia feature. I want to know what type of car Winona Ryder drives in Stranger Things for no real reason. I want Netflix to tell me that varsity jackets aren’t a thing in the U.K. even though the kids in Sex Education wear them anyway. This will have absolutely no impact on my life but I want it anyway. I’ve never been an avid user of Amazon Prime Video, but now I want to watch more of its originals just for the trivia. Maybe I’ll finally get round to watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, or whatever Mozart in the Jungle is. Forget endlessly scrolling through the homepage; streaming’s biggest time-waster is the trivia page.


Want to get watching right away? Amazon offers a free trial so you can start streaming without committing a cent. Note: If you sign up for a free trial through these links, GQ may earn an affiliate commission.