When Hulu launched its subscription service a decade ago, it wasn’t expecting to become the sexier, R-rated sibling of Disney+. But in the past six months, Hulu’s had a remarkable run of provocative originals like The Great, Normal People, High Fidelity, and Little Fires Everywhere. All of those shows, as well as ongoing series like Ramy, Shrill, and The Handmaid’s Tale, are now feeding quarantined viewers’ excitement-starved eyes and percolating award-season chatter. While Disney+ launched with an eye on family-friendly content, Hulu leaned into originals with a serrated edge—something it will need to cut through an ever-expanding field of streamers (Netflix! Amazon! Apple TV+! HBO Max! Peacock!).
“We are not throwing a million things up against the wall,” Craig Erwich, Hulu’s head of original content, tells me via Zoom. Hulu offers a large library of TV shows and movies as well as the option to watch live TV channels, which takes some pressure off original programming. His team can take a picky, curatorial approach while spending a fraction of Netflix’s content budget. That sometimes translates into prestige prizes: in 2017, Hulu became the first streamer to win a coveted best-drama-series Emmy (for The Handmaid’s Tale). And this year, they nabbed best-actor Golden Globes for both The Act and Ramy.
At Hulu’s digital NewFront presentation for media buyers today, the streamer will boast of more projects steeped in big names, heady subjects, and award aspirations. They included Dopesick, a limited series about America’s opioid problem written by Emmy-winner Danny Strong and starring Michael Keaton; The Dropout, starring Kate McKinnon as Theranos super-scammer Elizabeth Holmes, showrun by New Girl creator Liz Meriwether; Nine Perfect Strangers, which reunites Nicole Kidman, David E. Kelley, and Big Little Lies’ author Liane Moriarty; Amy Schumer comedy Love, Beth; and Woke, a partly-animated comedy starring Lamorne Morris about a Black cartoonist awakened by his run-in with police.
“I think there’s a natural instinct to want to take more shots,” said Dana Walden, the Disney Television Studios chairman who oversees Hulu’s original content. Streamers like Netflix greenlight tons of shows “because no one can know with 100% certainty what thing’s going to catch lightning.” But Walden sees volume as the enemy of great television—something she learned during the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, when she was working at 20th Century Fox Studios. While the company produced a fraction of its usual number of pilots, she says they emerged from the season with enduring hits like Glee and Modern Family. “It was a great experiment for us about what happens when the entire resources of an organization are devoted to making fewer projects great.”
Originally owned by multiple media companies, Hulu once served as streaming home for various networks’ current shows and back catalogs. Since its acquisition by Disney, Hulu has formed part of the entertainment giant’s two-pronged assault on the streaming market, alongside Disney+. There were some growing pains, as a few shows got caught between the two: High Fidelity and Love, Victor were initially greenlit for Disney+ but then jumped over to Hulu to allow more wiggle room for adult subject matter.
“The ending point of the first season is about Victor deciding declaratively that he is gay, and [the creators] wanted to pursue storylines that were specifically about that character exploring his life as a young gay man,” Walden said of the main character in Love, Victor. “That season, done as the creators want it to be done, is a Hulu Original and not a Disney+.” (On the other hand, my colleague Richard Lawson argues that Love, Victor would have made a more powerful cultural statement had it stayed on Disney+.)
Then there’s the case of the much-anticipated Disney+ Lizzie McGuire reboot, which seemed to fizzle when both the original creator and its star Hilary Duff pushed for more R-rated content. “It would be a dream if Disney would let us move the show to Hulu,” Duff pleaded on social media. Hulu does not share that dream. “I appreciate her fandom,” Erwich offered with a grin—but added, “We have not had any conversations with Hilary Duff around her show.”
Hulu has also been buoyed by another high-end TV brand recently added to the mix: FX, one of the pioneers of groundbreaking prestige cable television, from The Shield and Nip/Tuck to The Americans and Atlanta. All of FX’s back catalog is now gathered on Hulu, and certain new shows—such as Mrs. America and Devs—exclusively premiere on a vertical called FX on Hulu, skipping the cable channel altogether. FX chief John Landgraf will continue to program FX on Hulu as he sees fit, which Walden sees as one way for Hulu to keep the feel of small curatorial teams while ramping up the number of new shows.
Landgraf has long been a very public figure in the entertainment industry; he coined the term “peak TV” and regularly parses viewing trends. Erwich, on the other hand, has stayed behind the scenes at Hulu since he arrived there in 2014, having previously been an exec at Warner Horizon studio and Fox network. “I’ve always believed in putting the artists first and letting the show and the work speak,” Erwich insisted, nodding to talent on his Hulu Originals team like Beatrice Springborn.
As a kid, Erwich watched Hill Street Blues, a precursor to the modern golden era of television with its gritty dialogue, flawed characters, and roving camera: “It blew my mind into a million pieces and pretty much inspired me to pursue the career I did.” He said that if he could recruit any single creator to make a series at Hulu, it would be Quentin Tarantino: “One of the things that we talk a lot about at Hulu is originality through tone and reinvention through tone, and I think no one has kind of reinvented more genres tonally than Quentin Tarantino. I’d give my left arm to be in business with him.”
Many of Hulu’s existing series do feel unexpectedly original: The Great is far more twisted than a costume drama has a right to be. Ramy probes spiritual agony with charm to spare. Normal People is strange and sexy beneath its dowdy naturalism. Erwich said that the streamer searches for entertaining projects that have multiple layers. With Normal People, they could see the show wasn’t just about a will-they-won’t-they dynamic: “The other conversation is the power dynamics with male-female relationships. And then there’s the fun conversation the internet had about Connell’s chain.” That chain, by the way, has its own Instagram account, with 184,000 followers.
Walden pointed out that the release of these new series also “coincided with quarantine, where people were stuck inside and looking for great content. Luck is a part of any really successful strategy!”
While most streamers have gone mad for reboots and sequels, Hulu seems more focused on crafting things we have not seen before. “You look at the entire competitive landscape of television, close to 600 shows—but there’s not this show,” Walden said of Normal People. But building a creative pipeline for mold-breaking series requires patience. One of the ways Hulu made a name for itself was by giving space to creators overlooked by other outlets—particularly women. Hulu picked up Mindy Kaling’s Mindy Project when it was canceled by Fox and made it a central part of its slate.
“We realized we’re not sure that we have enough for this audience to watch, which is how shows like Shrill, Dollface, Pen 15, and the upcoming Amy Schumer show came to be,” Erwich said. The streamer had a similar experience when internal metrics showed that Wu-Tang: An American Saga brought in “a whole new audience”—something Hulu intends to build on.
The streamer uses metrics to help decide on series renewals, Erwich said, “but they don’t inform every decision. I can tell you that the decision to renew Ramy for season two was very much about the relevancy of that show and their critical responses. It wasn’t about something a spreadsheet would tell you.”
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