Amaze-on

Clutching her golden trophy with two hands, the creator of Transparent, Jill Soloway, thanked both Amazon and Bezos. Tambor called the company his “new best friend”.

It was a remarkable moment, considering that only months ago Bezos and Amazon were being cast as the enemies of American letters. The company’s long-simmering conflict with book publishers over e-book prices had broken out into open warfare, with Amazon going so far as to delay shipments of certain Hachette titles deliberately — a move that invited the collective wrath of the literary world. TV host Stephen Colbert directed an obscene gesture at Amazon on national television.

The juxtaposition says a lot about Amazon’s unusual place in American culture. At the same time that the company was effectively engaged in a book blockade, it was producing what is now an award-winning series that tackles the ambitious subject of transgender people.

As surprising as the company’s breakthrough success with Transparent may be, it is also consistent with its history and identity. Amazon is the first digital streaming service to win a Golden Globe for best TV series. In other words, the company that has changed the way consumers buy everything from diapers to high-definition TVs is disrupting yet another industry.

“What we’ve learned, which is kind of our theory from the beginning, is that you really have to go with passion,” Roy Price, vice president of Amazon Studios, said hours after winning the award.

Golden Globes voters have always been careful to honour a wide-ranging group of winners, partly as a way to assure high-wattage attendance; still, the box score reveals just how drastically the TV landscape has changed. All of the awards in TV categories went to first-time winners, with the big four networks coming away empty-handed.

Once dominated by the broadcast networks and a handful of cable channels, television is now a wide-open field. Any company with the resources to produce quality programming and a distribution platform can compete for viewers. And awards.

“For all of us who are in big broadcast television, you really admire when new voices break through,” Nina Tassler, chairwoman of CBS Entertainment, said. “What it speaks to is the level of authenticity you get when people write from their own personal experiences.”

But the night’s big winner was Amazon. Asked after the awards show what it was like working with the company, Tambor said it had “guts” and “taste”. Soloway said she did not even know Transparent would be nominated when she started working on the show.

Hollywood was initially sceptical about the tech company’s decision to get into TV. When Amazon created its own studio group nearly five years ago, it tried to crowdsource programming. Rather than recruiting established talent, it solicited web submissions for scripts and posted TV pilots online, analysing viewer feedback to decide whether to go forward with projects.

Its first batch of original productions made their debut in 2013 and generated little attention or acclaim. Critics complained about not knowing how to find the programmes on Amazon’s site. Only one of the adult-targeted shows in that set, the Washington-meets-frat-house comedy Alpha House, was renewed for a second season.

In response, Amazon started to introduce programming with a more distinctive tone, cinematic quality and novelistic storytelling. It also lured bigger names and started paying more competitively, announcing that it would invest $100 million in original content during the third quarter of 2014. Transparent and another well-received new series, Mozart in the Jungle, about the behind-the-scenes drama of a symphony, are examples of this shift in strategy.

It is too early to judge Amazon’s foray into original content a success. The company has approved a wide array of pilots. And one progressive, award-winning series is not likely to quieten the company’s critics. Though Amazon recently resolved its dispute with Hachette, resentment towards the company still lingers in the publishing industry.

“Amazon spent months sanctioning books and hurting thousands of authors,” said Doug Preston, who wrote an open letter signed by more than 900 authors protesting against the company. “This excellent show doesn’t make Amazon a friend of creative content. Even Napoleon had some mighty fine-looking uniforms.”

But on Golden Globes night at least, Amazon’s battles with the book publishing industry were forgotten, and its TV executives vindicated.“A couple of years ago, we were sitting at the El Pollo Loco, thinking that maybe we should develop some TV shows, and now here we are,” Price said.

The Woody Allen deal

Two days after winning its first major awards at the Golden Globes, Amazon signed on Woody Allen to write and direct an online series. This will be Allen’s first foray onto the small screen and the yet-to-be titled series will be a half-hour, Amazon said.

The series will be shown exclusively on its Instant Prime Video service next year. The famously press-shy Allen joked that he was not sure how he got involved in the project. “I have no ideas and I’m not sure where to begin,” the Oscar-winning director said. “My guess is that Roy Price will regret this,” he added, referring to the vice-president of Amazon Studios.