【Hollywood Archives】

Yes,Hollywood Archives there islife after dragons and frost giants, and for Game of Thrones'Robb Stark (Richard Madden) that life continues in space as, yes, an interstellar priest.

That's the premise of Amazon's new streaming series Oasis, a science fiction tale based on the novel The Book of Strange New Thingsby Michel Faber.

There's not much available online in the way of a trailer, other than a super-brief snippet tossed into the middle of Amazon's other pilots, which makes it seem like Amazon is playing to its installed base instead of trying to draw in new viewers. (Or maybe it's just that they still haven't figured out how to compete with Netflix yet.)

The hour-long episode is free (if you sign in with an Amazon account) and the initial episode looks fairly low budget for sci-fi. Nevertheless, the show's lifted by the quality of the camera work and a stellar cast, which includes Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire) and a no longer cute and cuddly but fully man-bearded Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense). We even get an eyeful of prime Madden beefcake in the nude early on, so there's that.

Without spoiling anything, we can reveal that the plot is about Madden's character leaving Earth (which is on the verge of collapse) to travel to a human colony on another planet.

Game of Thronesstar? Check. Use of the word "strange" somewhere in the show's lineage as possible Hollywood mojo to duplicate the success of Stranger Things? Check. Now all viewers have to do is submit to Amazon's ever creeping eCommerce embrace and the purveyor of pampers and toilet tissue might have something here.

However, other than Transparentand The Man in the High Castle(I mean, Goliath is okay, I guess), Amazon's original lineup hasn't been able to compete with the original hits streaming from Netflix, but this new sci-fi candy might help.

So far, viewers have given the pilot 4.5 stars. That, and the idea of a pious but ruggedly sexy "Robb Stark in Space" should be enough to give the show a fighting chance.