The 2025 TV schedule may be winding down as we approach the end of November, but Critical Role has a big release on the way for anybody with an Amazon Prime Video subscription. The Mighty Nein debuts on the streamer on Wednesday, November 19, set in the same world as The Legend of Vox Machina. Prime Video temporarily released the premiere streaming free before the official debut on November 19, but I learned an important lesson from when something similar happened ahead of Vox Machina’s third season, and I have a feeling that it will apply to the rest of the The Mighty Nein‘s first season as well.
First things first! While set in the same world as The Legend of Vox Machina, The Mighty Nein isn’t a conventional spinoff and instead centers on a brand new crew of characters. Viewers can expect a wizard, a goblin, a shipwrecked sailor, a ringmaster, a monk, and someone who brings the chaos. Fugitives and outcasts, they must work together to save the realm and prevent the unraveling of reality. So, the stakes are a little bit different from Vox Machina’s dragons!
The series premiere of The Mighty Nein began streaming for free on the Prime Video Youtube page starting at 12 a.m. PT on November 14 and remained available until November 16 at 11:59 p.m. PT. At the time of writing on Sunday night, the video has accumulated more than 1.6 million views, with a comment section filled with nearly 5.6k comments.
This is enough for me to be confident that there will be plenty of discussion between fans on social media in the not-too-distant future, especially since Prime Video will be releasing episodes weekly rather than in one fell swoop. The weekly release schedule worked for The Legend of Vox Machina, after all, which is set to return for Season 4 in the 2026 TV schedule.
And I became a big fan of The Legend of Vox Machina when I discovered it during the hiatus between Seasons 2 and 3, but that also taught me a valuable lesson, and I’d recommend it to other viewers planning on tuning in to The Mighty Nein as well: stay far away from the comment sections of the official accounts if you don’t want to be massively spoiled.
I don’t just mean the normal amount of spoilers that you can expect from fans who watched the latest episodes as soon as possible and want to discuss. The Mighty Nein is based on the second Dungeons & Dragons campaign run by voice actor Matt Mercer for his friends and Critical Role costars, with the campaign running from early 2018 – mid-2021. The beginning, middle, and end of the original story are already available online on multiple platforms, and the passionate pre-existing fandom likely will have plenty to say online about the animated series.
Of course, based on what has happened in The Legend of Vox Machina, the Critical Role team is more than willing to make changes in the adaptation to an animated show, but the major twists are likely going to make it from table to stream. As executive producer and cast member Travis Willingham told CinemaBlend about Vox Machina Season 3 last year:
For us, so much of our audience has an expectation of what’s coming, and it’s our task to upset those expectations, and sort of redirect how the story is told, so that people may know what’s coming, but the effects of it, we want it to last and have people wonder what’s coming from episode to episode. So if we can do that, we feel like we’ve been effective in our storytelling this time through.
Nevertheless, as somebody who was already spoiled on some big twists after doing a bit of research to review Tusk Love, I have to recommend that spoiler-phobes avoid comment sections at all costs. I doubt that knowing what I know due to Tusk Love will taint the viewing experience, and getting spoiled about Critical Role’s Campaign 1 had me looking forward to how the company would handle bringing spicy scenes to the small screen, but newcomers may lose the element of surprise for the biggest twists from comment sections.
If you missed the free streaming window on YouTube, the wait to check out the episode isn’t too much longer. The first three episodes of The Mighty Nein will premiere on Wednesday, November 19 on Prime Video. You can also find all three seasons of The Legend of Vox Machina so far on the streamer. The main cast includes Matt Mercer, Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Marisha Ray, Ashley Johnson, Liam O’Brien, Taliesin Jaffe, and Sam Riegel.
