The best shows to watch on Hulu right now

A study of grief and Italian beef, Christopher Storer’s restaurant dramedy is the breakout series of the last few years, and for good reason: it’s emotional, stressful and chaotically funny. Jeremy Allen White is simply phenomenal as chef Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto, a fine-dining wunderkind forced back home to run his recently deceased brother’s struggling Chicago sandwich shop, and he’s matched by equally fantastic turns from Ayo Edebiri and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as his ever-quarreling business partners. Storer seemed to run out of story in the navel-gazing third season, but the characters are so well-drawn you want to keep following them, no matter where they head next.

By leagues the biggest show of 2024, racking up huge viewing numbers, universal critical praise and record-breaking amount of Emmys, this sweeping samurai drama filled the hole for bloody, stone-serious epics left on the television landscape by the end of Game of Thrones. Set in 1600s Japan and based on the novel by James Clavell, it tells a historically informed – but ultimately fictional – story of a powerful warlord fighting to advance his position against the political rivals who have it out for him. Its dense storytelling is aided by sumptuous visuals and strong performances from Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis. While initially intended as a limited series, it’s been renewed for at least two additional seasons.

How many times over the last decade have you awakened to some fresh hell in your news feed and thought, ‘This is just like The Handmaid’s Tale’? Not a great sign for society, but it’s indicative of the prescience of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, and of Hulu’s decision to adapt the book a year into the first Trump administration. A confirmation of the ‘prestige streaming’ era, the first season cleaned up at the Emmy Awards, and while the show has since expanded far past the source material, it remains a harrowing depiction of female subjugation, with an astounding performance from Elisabeth Moss at its centre. The sixth and final season premiered in April 2025.

Sterling K Brown reunites with This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman for an entirely different kind of show, a political thriller with a sci-fi twist. Brown is a Secret Service agent who happens upon the body of the President of the United States (James Marsden, somehow) and is soon suspected in his assassination. And the twist? It all takes place in a post-apocalyptic America where the surviving population is confined to a bunker in Colorado. Ridiculous? Maybe. But Brown lends the gravitas to keep it both grounded and highly watchable. 

America’s true-crime fixation meets its reborn love of murder mysteries in this modern send-up of Agatha Christie. It stars Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as an unlikely trio of neighbours investigating suspicious deaths in their shared Manhattan apartment complex – and podcasting about it, naturally. Of course, Short and Martin could make a seven-part documentary about watching grass die hilarious, while Gomez plays off them well as the deadpan straight woman many years their junior. Guest stars include Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd, Sting and Zach Galifianakis – among many others.

A recently divorced hepatologist (Jesse Eisenberg) finds himself loving the single life – until his ex-wife (Claire Danes) drops their two kids off at his house and promptly vanishes, causing him to pause his midlife sexual awakening and reevaluate everything he thought he knew about himself. The ‘70s Woody Allen vibes are strong with this intellectual comic thriller, based on the book by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a surprisingly gripping evaluation of upper-class anxiety, Jewish neurosis and the nature of marriage. 

When their multimillionaire deli-owner father dies in a golf mishap, rich-kid failsons Mir and Raj inherit the family business – and the drug empire they previously knew nothing about. A fast-paced crime caper first and foremost, stars Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh are hilarious as nepo party boys ill-equipped to do their own laundry, let alone run a criminal enterprise. But the details pertaining to the Pakistani-American experience give it depth beyond the entertaining premise. 

An honest, absorbing look at a complicated relationship, this adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel – a co-production between Hulu and the BBC – doesn’t sound like much in a brief synopsis. A well-heeled overachiever (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and a rugby player (Paul Mescal) start a secret affair in high school that stretches through their college years and beyond. As time goes on, they fight, separate and return, and through it all end up bonded in profound ways. Again, it’s the stuff of countless romances, in film, TV and literature, but Mescal and Edgar-Jones bring such affection, pain and nuance to their roles it’ll leave bruises on your heart.

A show about Native Americans, written, directed and starring Native Americans, shouldn’t be groundbreaking at this late date, but alas, Reservation Dogs is the first of its kind on US television. Not that the series makes a big deal of it: it has the laid-back vibe of a ’90s indie slacker comedy, following a group of Muscogee Nation teenagers on a reservation in Oklahoma as they pull a series of extremely petty crimes in an effort to fund an escape to California. Shaggy as the narrative is, the depiction of ‘rez’ life is full of idiosyncratic details, and the ultimate message, about honouring one’s heritage even while trying to separate from it, is surprisingly poignant.

Growing up is gross, and this daring coming-of-age comedy spares few of the gory details. Thirtysomething co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle more or less play themselves, only as they were at age 13 – a rather remarkable feat of acting that starts as a gag, then becomes virtually unnoticeable despite their co-stars being actual teenagers. Set in the early 2000s, it’s also a sharp rebuke of the idea that the post-Internet Age has no defining aesthetic. Anyone who used AOL Instant Messenger to chat their crush, shopped at Limited Too or even just understands the joke of the title will be transported back to their own adolescence.

Historians may grit their teeth, but then, this hysterically vulgar depiction of the rise of Catherine the Great never claimed to be biographically accurate. In fact, it promoted itself as ‘an almost entirely untrue story’. No matter: Elle Fanning is an absolute delight as the long-reigning empress of Russia, tracking her ongoing attempts to overthrow her buffoonish husband, Peter III, played with oblivious overconfidence by Nicholas Hoult. Created by Tony McNamara, co-writer of The Favourite, it’s a darkly absurdist takedown of monarchical power – and it’s adorned with fabulous costumes. Huzzah! 

Similar to Reservation Dogs, Ramy puts a long-overdue spotlight on a group typically marginalised on television, in this case American Muslims. Comedian and series co-creator Ramy Youssef plays a version of himself, a twentysomething millennial of Egyptian heritage living in New Jersey and struggling to reconcile his faith with his personal desires, his generation’s value system and his family’s expectations of him. Much of the humour comes from Youssef’s chronic inability to navigate those competing interests – and he isn’t afraid to make himself look like the bad guy. It’s insightful as it is hysterical.

In between Annihilation and Men, Alex Garland wrote and directed this miniseries, a slow-moving but rewarding sci-fi conspiracy thriller set within a mysterious tech company. Ex Machina’s Sonoya Mizuno is a Silicon Valley engineer whose co-worker boyfriend is murdered the same day he gets promoted. As she tries to figure out what happened to him, the true nature of her employer’s objectives gradually reveals itself. A high level of patience is required, but it’s ultimately worth sticking with – the gorgeous cinematography certainly helps, too.  

A dramatisation of the feminist revolution, angled from the perspective of one of the movement’s fiercest opponents, this miniseries almost plays like a Mad Men spinoff. (In fact, it was created by one of that show’s writers, Dahvi Waller, and features Roger Sterling himself, John Slattery.) Cate Blanchett is deeply intimidating as Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who fought successfully throughout the 1970s to stop the Equal Rights Amendment and thus established the battlefield for decades of culture war skirmishes to come. But the show is loaded with impressive performances, including Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem and Orange Is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba, who won an Emmy for her fiery turn as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.     

One of the best shows of television’s pre-Golden Age, Moonlighting was frustratingly unavailable for years before Hulu finally brought it to streaming in 2023. It’s the series that introduced Bruce Willis as an actor, and as a persona. As David Addison, he’s something of a proto-John McClane, a smart-ass private eye forced into a partnership with the owner of his agency, a former model played by Cybill Shepherd. Yes, the aesthetic is severely ’80s, but the two leads have a timeless screwball chemistry, and the ‘mystery of the week’ format makes it perfect for the binge-watch era.