47
FX could use the Disney cash. Though
it was the first streaming service to win
top honors at the Emmys, with The
Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu has had surpris-
ingly few big hits. But a Veronica Mars
revival, Patricia Arquette in true-crime
docudrama The Act, and auteur com-
edies Pen15 and Ramy made 2019 its
strongest year to date.
Viewership stats are sparse, but
from a creative standpoint, Hulu’s
problem is that it greenlights a lot of
projects that sound great on paper—
Aidy Bryant in Lindy West’s semi-
autobiographical sitcom Shrill, Kat
Dennings in surrealist breakup comedy
Dollface, Mindy Kaling’s Four Weddings
and a Funeral reboot—without ensuring
the execution lives up to the pitch.
Even The Handmaid’s Tale, so poignant
and thought- provoking in Season 1, has
since been characterized by plot holes
and gratuitous cruelty.
Still, FX reportedly will contribute
one third of Hulu’s originals in 2020
and 2021, and with a stable of shows
that still skews somewhat masculine, it
in strategy—as HBO employees learned
in 2018, when John Stankey became
WarnerMedia’s chief executive and de-
manded that a network known for qual-
ity focus on quantity. Since then, HBO
upped its output of original content
from around 100 hours per year to 150,
with another 10% increase projected for
- Though that growth hasn’t neces-
sarily hurt HBO’s creative success rate,
it has seemed to exceed many viewers’
bandwidth, as genre hits outshine qui-
eter and weirder gems.
Even in a best-case scenario, we’ll
have to trust one of an increasingly
small number of entertainment mega-
corps to save a place for art amid
billion- dollar commerce. With the ad-
dition of FX Networks’ ambitious slate,
as well as in-house projects on the grand
scale of Little Fires Everywhere, Hulu
seems well positioned to be its parent
company’s answer to Netflix, HBO and
all the rest. But at a corporation like
Disney, there’s always a bigger picture.
Who knows what that will look like
when it finally comes into focus? □
stands to balance Hulu’s largely female
focus. Along with Little Fires, High
Fidelity and the Hillary Clinton docu-
series Hillary, the platform’s spring slate
includes an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s
zeitgeisty novel Normal People and Elle
Fanning as a young Catherine the Great.
Broadening Hulu’s viewership might
well make the $13 Disney+/Hulu/
ESPN+ bundle Disney is offering an
attractive alternative to Netflix.
For viewers, Hulu’s expansion ap-
pears to be a silver lining to the colos-
sal storm cloud that is Disney invad-
ing every corner of the entertainment
industry: lots of premium programming
at no additional cost. But this synergy
doesn’t come without risk. After years
of rapid expansion, Disney has entered
a transitional period, as its imperial Bob
Iger era gives way to Bob Chapek’s new
regime. Hulu has just had a leadership
shake-up of its own, with Randy Freer
exiting as its CEO and Kelly Campbell
succeeding him as president.
New leadership can bring big changes
Washington, left, and Witherspoon play mismatched moms in Hulu’s much-anticipated Little Fires Everywhere
ILLUSTRATION BY LILI DES BELLONS FOR TIME; LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE: HULU
