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The 11 Best Original TV Shows on Hulu

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

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Ramy (Image: Barbara Nitke / Hulu)

It's been well over a decade since Hulu launched as the go-to place for catching up on TV you missed the night before. But reruns are no way to make a name for yourself. It started dabbling in relatively affordable original scripted content in 2012 with the mocumentary Battleground, but has since kicked things up a notch..

Hulu's slate of originals almost rivals Netflix or Amazon in quality, but not in quantity. Maybe that will change now that Disney is mainly in charge, but Disney has a lot of content to push over on Disney+, so it remains to be seen. Thankfully a lot of what's come to Hulu of late is already great, and there's more to come, including a lot of weird Marvel originals (Howard the Duck, animated!), new seasons of The Orville, a revival of Animaniacs, and more. Until then, here's the best of what you can stream only on Hulu.

Castle Rock

Hulu sticks with what works. What works is Stephen King. Hulu's adaptation of his 11.22.63 was a big success, so creating an ongoing show set in King's fictional horror mecca, the setting of Castle Rock, Maine, (where Shawshank State Penitentiary is located!) was a smart move. The horror of the first two seasons crossed over not only into Shawshank, but into Misery. This is can't-miss TV for King fans.

Casual

In Casual's 2015 debut, Hulu got its first taste of what it's like to do prestige TV. Jason Reitman's show earned critical accolades and even a Golden Globe nomination for Best TV Series—Comedy or Musical. Stars Michaela Watkins and Tommy Dewey play grown siblings Valerie and Alex, both broken by their past relationships and odd-ball parents, so they're pretty dependent on each other. It's Tara Lynne Barr as Valerie's independent teenage daughter Laura that anchors them more than anything—until she too has her own problems (ah, teenagers).

The show's take on modern dating and relationships is funny, frustrating (as it should be), and abounds with dark-comedy undertones without going too far into the maudlin. The fourth and sadly final season showed a not-to-far-in-the-future look at what dating would be like for the characters—and us.

The First

A Hulu joint production with Channel 4 in the UK, The First is the tale of a first mission, that of men to Mars, in the future decade of the 2030s. Sean Penn brings great gravitas to the roll of the mission leader hoping to actually lead after the initial launch without him goes tragically awry. The future depicted is both grave (yep, we ruined the world) and beautiful (interfaces and smart glasses get a lot better). It's all brought to you by Beau Willimon, the former showrunner at Netflix's House of Cards. Sadly, the 8-episode first season will not be getting a follow-up.

The Handmaid's Tale

Many services become synonymous with one show. For Hulu, that program has becomeThe Handmaid's Tale, based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, and exec produced for TV by Bruce Miller. Winner of multiple awards, this is true prestige TV with the queen of peak TV in the lead: Elisabeth Moss.

In the dystopian US of The Handmaid's Tale, called Gilead, fertile women like Moss' June are forced to be concubines to the new country's fundamentalist dictators. The TV show goes beyond what the book—and the pretty terrible 1990 movie—could do. Subsequent seasons went even further, pushing the story well past what the original novel covered. This isn't just the best show on Hulu. It is arguably the best show on any streaming service and perhaps on TV, period. If you binge it all and feel bereft, check out Shows to Watch If You Love The Handmaid's Tale.

Harlots

Hulu's done a good job acquiring shows from across the pond, and Harlots is an excellent example. This show, which aired on ITV Encore in the UK, focuses on a brothel in 1763 London, and stars Jessica Brown Findlay from Downton Abbey and Samantha Morton from Sweet and Lowdown and Minority Report. But this costume drama doesn't turn its characters into whore-house caricatures or exploit them, nor does it depict their lives as utter misery. These are well-rounded sex workers from 250 years ago, but sex only gets them so far. Three seasons are available.

Marvel's Runaways

Everyone wants a slice of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and Hulu got theirs with a series based on a unique Marvel comic book. Runaways is about a group of kids who find out their parents are super villains and literally run away so they can fight them. Runaways the TV series takes a much more nuanced look at the kids and the villainous parents than the comic book—(SPOILER!) it takes the full first season before the kids run away. In the meantime, there's teenage angst, super powers, parental angst, a tamed dinosaur named Old Lace, and the return of actor Julian McMahon to a Marvel property after playing Doctor Doom several years ago. The third and final season is now available.

The Path

The Path stars Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), Michelle Monaghan (True Detective), and Hugh Dancy (Hannibal) as a family that's joined a "movement" (AKA a cult) called Meyerism. It's sort of the opposite of Scientology, in that the founder urges members to avoid publicity. The show is about what happens when the father of the family (Paul) starts to question his faith. Hulu pulled the plug after the recent third season, but that means there are 36 episodes online for your streaming pleasure.

Pen15

Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle created the show PEN15 (get it?) and play versions of themselves at age 13, going into middle school in the year 2000. The other actors playing their peers area actual 13, while those two are in their 30s. It's weird, but it works. Hilariously, and painfully for anyone who's already navigated those waters can attest. It works so well that the series is making it on many a "Best of 2019" list, it's had special coverage in The New York Times, plus it's got Emmy nominations. Look for things to get even more awkward in the upcoming season 2.

Shrill

In the typical Hollywood production, fat characters are depicted as desperately trying to lose weight to get the guy, fit into that dress, or otherwise mold themselves into a wispy vision of perfection deemed acceptable by magazines, fashion designers, and society at large. Shrill is not that story. The Hulu adaptation of writer Lindy West's best-selling memoir, this series follows Annie (SNL's Aidy Bryant) as she tries to change her life — but not her body. Season one is streaming; season two arrives Jan. 24.

Ramy

It's already hard to be a millennial in the US, now try being a Muslim millennial. But that's exactly what stand-up comic Ramy Youssef is, and what he portrays in his show, Ramy. He's growing up as a second-generation Egyptian-American, trying to get by and be a good person. The show has a 97 percent fresh rating with critics at Rotten Tomatoes, thanks to being a soulful but entirely original and quite funny take on being a Muslim in post-9/11 New Jersey. Season 2 is coming in 2020.

Veronica Mars

Few shows were ever as good as Veronica Mars, especially that first season back in 2004, and it's had two revivals. One was a Kickstarter-backed movie in 2014 that made five times as much money as requested. The second is the fourth full season of the show brought to you exclusively by Hulu.

And what a season. The original cast is back, with Kristen Bell, now famous for The Good Place and Frozen, still kicking ass as Veronica, the smart-mouthed PI who once solved crimes in high school. She's still doing so as a 30-something, stuck in her sea-side hometown of Neptune, CA. She works with her dad, played by Enrico Colantoni, and they're still the best father/daughter team in TV history even when they don't get along. The new season has them tracking a bomber who's disrupting the town's spring break crowd; it all leads up to a shocking ending no one saw coming. I'd like to personally thank Hulu for bringing one more season to life and yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing season 5 in a few years. (Hulu also has the original episodes plus the movie available for streaming.)

Other Top Originals

For more, check out our picks for the best original:

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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