Hulu

By now, television viewers should be inured to watching scenes of sexual congress on their screens. With any number of explicit programs airing over the past few years — given that mainstream cinema has more or less abandoned the sex scene, it is little wonder that it has snuck into the privacy of our homes — watching graphically depicted coupling should be nothing especially remarkable. But even so, the sheer amount of intercourse that is depicted in Hulu’s new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hugely successful novel, Rivals, comes as a surprise.

It was to be the year of Shōgun. In one of the cleanest sweeps since Succession ended, the show won virtually everything at this year’s Emmys, including Best Drama Series, Lead Actress in a Drama for Anna Sawai and, unsurprisingly, Lead Actor in a Drama for the phenomenal Hiroyuki Sanada, who triumphed in a category that had some equally strong choices (Gary Oldman for Slow Horses), as well as some more perplexing ones (Idris Elba for Hijack and, bizarrely, Dominic West for The Crown). Shōgun took a record-breaking eighteen Emmys in total, with showrunner Justin Marks remarking of its makers Hulu and FX, “You guys greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese period piece whose central climax revolves around a poetry competition.” It proved to be a good bet.

Since the vast success of Game of Thrones, every streaming service has tried its best to come up with an epic series that will be held in the same estimation as the earlier seasons of Thrones. (The HBO flagship drama's rise was rivaled only by the rightful contempt in which the final series is still held, which one day will be the subject of a genuinely jaw-dropping long read or book.) There have been some close calls (House of the Dragon, Outlander), some misses (Lord of the Rings) and a couple of outright horrors; I doubt that you could pay me, or anyone else, to sit through the diabolical Wheel of Time again. But now Hulu has finally joined the action, with an apparently unlimited budget, to adapt James Clavell’s much-beloved bestselling 1975 novel Shōgun over ten episodes.

The third series of the hit comedy-mystery series Only Murders in the Building has arrived on Hulu, to the same critical acclaim as the previous two installments, and the adventures of Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez show few signs of coming to an end. This time the trio are joined by none other than acting royalty Meryl Streep, playing Loretta, a plucky but frustrated actress who has never advanced to the big time, and Paul Rudd, the supposedly nicest man in Hollywood, deliberately cast against type as the obnoxious and entitled star of the show that Short is directing on Broadway, which he is hoping will restore his fortunes: a desire cruelly frustrated by Rudd’s character dropping dead on opening night.

We live in an age in which everything sounds so grave. Our democracy is in peril! Covid numbers are going up! It’s a cause for rejoicing, then, that one of the best new series treats that most serious of subjects — namely, homicide — with such a deft and delightful touch. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, which was created by co-star Steve Martin and John Hoffman, expands the honorable tradition of the Thin Man series and Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, movies that used the murder-mystery format as a pretext for their sophisticated urbanites to poke around in other people’s residences and speculate wittily on who done it. The series wraps up its second season on Tuesday.

The studio pitch for Hulu’s new direct-to-streaming action thriller The Princess probably went something like this: “What if we crossed The Princess Bride with The Raid: Redemption?” Honestly, though, that logline makes the film sound better than it is. The Princess is a dizzying, hyperviolent spectacle that blends nonstop combat with a decidedly progressive moral vision, resulting in an eminently GIF-able — but emotionally sterile — finished product. The eponymous Princess (Joey King, whose breakout role was Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby), who’s never given a proper name, inhabits a quasi-fantastical European kingdom devoid of magic or monsters on the model of The Princess Diaries’ Genovia.

The new and thoroughly adult-oriented miniseries Pam & Tommy tells the tale of the relationship between the musician Tommy Lee and the actress Pamela Anderson. It is interspersed with the narrative of the notorious theft and subsequent internet leak of their Nineties sex tape that has occupied a near-iconic place in popular culture ever since it occurred twenty-five years ago. Pam & Tommy was initially announced as a James Franco project in 2018, for him to both direct and star as Lee, but Franco’s current status as persona non grata saw him replaced by Sebastian Stan.