AS BULLETS fly around a high-speed train carrying a former Miss World and a gang of spies through the Italian Alps, shopping is surely the last thing on viewers’ minds. Yet should they press pause, they will see an option to buy items from the show: the heroine’s gold necklace, her red dress, the teetering stilettos in which she is improbably running rings around the villains. Only her exploding perfume is not yet for sale.

Citadel, a thriller on Amazon Prime Video, shows what happens when the world’s biggest online retailer becomes one of its biggest entertainment producers. As well as buying merchandise from the show on Amazon’s e-commerce site, audiences can listen to its soundtrack on Amazon Music, or read about its production on Amazon’s sister site, IMDB.com. Its multinational cast and plot, and planned spin-offs in different languages, are chosen to appeal to shoppers around the world.

Hollywood old hands are snooty about Amazon’s video efforts, and understandably so. Despite a reported budget of US$300 million, making it the second-priciest TV series in history (after The Rings of Power, another Amazon project), Citadel received lukewarm reviews and failed to crack the top ten most-streamed shows in America (Amazon says it has done better internationally). Critics see it as emblematic of the company’s high-spending, low-impact record in video. This year, Amazon will blow US$12 billion on streaming content, second only to Netflix. It has had some hits, including Reacher and The Boys. But its 45 streaming nominations at the upcoming Emmy Awards – a record for Amazon – is less than half of those of Netflix or Warner-Discovery’s service, Max. “Amazon’s hit rate is not good, nor consistent with its spend,” admits one former executive.