Kerry Washington in 'Little Fires Everywhere'
The best thing about a limited series is also the most obvious thing: it ends. A real ending, planned in advance, with nowhere left to drag its feet.
Done well, it's the most satisfying format television has to offer, and these shows are done very well. Hulu has built something of a reputation here, quietly and consistently delivering limited series that hold together from the first episode to the last, no matter the genre. From time-traveling missions to suburban implosions and weepy coming-of-age dramas, these are the series you need to add to your watch list.
'Normal People' Prepare yourself. Sally Rooney's novel about two Irish college students who love each other and can't stop getting in their own way got a TV adaptation that earns every bit of the sadness the book made you feel. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal play Marianne and Connell, a push-pull couple navigating class anxiety, intimacy, and the particular misery of being young and emotionally inept.
The sex scenes got people talking, which is what happens when a show treats intimacy like it actually matters, but what makes this 12-episode series so unnervingly good is how it refuses to let either character off the hook. Connell is sweet but cowardly; Marianne is magnetic but self-destructive. Neither of them is quite the villain their worst behavior suggests. It's also the show that made Mescal famous, which tracks.
The man is very good at being sad on camera, and the thin chain that launched a thousand TikToks didn't hurt either.
'Candy' In 1980, Candy Montgomery, a devoted Texas housewife, church choir singer, and general pillar of her community, slashed her neighbor Betty Gore with an axe 41 times. The true crime girlies have known about this case for years, but Hulu's dramatization — starring Jessica Biel with a committed Bob Ross afro — finally gave it the prestige treatment it warranted.
Pablo Schreiber plays Allan Gore, the grieving husband who is also, inconveniently, Candy's former affair partner, while Melanie Lynskey plays the poor woman on the chopping block. Biel was criminally underestimated for this performance. She plays Candy as a woman who has spent so many years being what everyone needed her to be that something, eventually, had to give.
The finale's slow-burn courtroom climax earns every minute of build-up, landing on an ending so deeply unsatisfying that you'll be angry about it days later. That's a compliment.
'The Girl From Plainville' Another true crime adaptation, The Girl From Plainville stars"It Girl" Elle Fanning as Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts teenager convicted of involuntary manslaughter for texting her depressed boyfriend Conrad Roy into suicide. It is grim stuff dressed in the pastel aesthetic of mid-2010s suburban girlhood with a pair of strong eyebrows to match.
The series toggles between court proceedings and the months leading up to Conrad's death, slowly dissecting how a lonely, delusional teenager convinced herself that helping him die was an act of love. What saves this from being another exploitation exercise is its refusal to box Michelle in as a two-dimensional sociopath. She's delusional, yes, starved for significance and attention in the most heartbreaking ways. Fanning performs all of it without asking the audience to forgive her terrible behavior.
The scene where she rehearses her grief at Conrad's funeral — performing sadness via a Glee monologue — is one of the best pieces of acting the streamer has ever aired.
'Dopesick' If you want to understand how hundreds of thousands of people got addicted to OxyContin while the family that made it donated wings to the Met, Dopesick is your eight hours. Michael Keaton plays a small-town Virginia doctor whose patients get hooked on the opioid while Richard Sackler oversees the whole catastrophe from the comfort of generational wealth.
Kaitlyn Dever, Rosario Dawson, and Peter Sarsgaard round out a cast stacked so aggressively it almost seems like overkill. Creator Danny Strong structures the series across multiple timelines, which sounds annoying in theory and works beautifully in practice, letting the audience watch the crime and its consequences unfold simultaneously. Keaton's Dr. Samuel Finnix is the emotional anchor, and his arc in the back half of the season is genuinely devastating.
Dopesick is one of the few prestige dramas about institutional corruption that never loses sight of the individual people ground up inside it. COLLIDER Collider · Quiz Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey's Anatomy · House · Scrubs Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous.
Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong. 🚨The Pitt 🏥ER 💉Grey's 🔬House 🩺Scrubs FIND YOUR HOSPITAL → QUESTION 1 / 8APPROACH 01 A critical patient comes through the door. What's your first instinct?
Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are. AStay completely present — block everything else out and work through it step by step, right now. BTriage fast and delegate — get the right people on the right problems immediately. CTrust my gut and move — I work best when I stop overthinking and just act.
DAsk the question everyone else is ignoring — what's the thing that doesn't fit? ETake a breath, make a joke to cut the tension, and then get to work — panic helps no one.
NEXT QUESTION → QUESTION 2 / 8MOTIVATION 02 Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you'd give in an interview. ABecause I wanted to be where it matters most — right at the edge, when someone's life is actually on the line. BBecause I wanted to help people — genuinely, one patient at a time, in a system that makes it hard.
CBecause I was drawn to the intensity of it — the stakes, the drama, the feeling of being fully alive. DBecause medicine is the most interesting puzzle there is — and I needed a problem worth solving. EBecause I wanted to make a difference — and also, honestly, I didn't know what else to do with my life.
NEXT QUESTION → QUESTION 3 / 8COLLEAGUES 03 What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are. ACompetence and calm — I need people who don't fall apart when things get bad. BTrust and reliability — I want to know that when I pass something off, it's handled.
CConnection — I want colleagues who become family, even if that gets complicated. DIntelligence and the willingness to be challenged — I have no interest in people who just agree with me. EFriendship — people I actually like spending twelve hours a day with, because those hours are going to happen either way.
NEXT QUESTION → QUESTION 4 / 8LOSS 04 You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who's worked a long shift has had to answer this question. AI carry it.
All of it. I don't look for ways to put it down — that weight is part of doing this work honestly. BI process it and move — you have to, or the next patient suffers for the one you just lost. CI feel it deeply and lean on the people around me — I don't think you're supposed to handle that alone.
DI go back over every decision — not to punish myself, but because I need to understand what I missed. EI grieve it genuinely, find some way to laugh about something unrelated, and try to be kind to myself — imperfectly.
NEXT QUESTION → QUESTION 5 / 8STYLE 05 How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image. AIntense and completely present — no small talk during a shift, but exactly who you want there. BSteady and dependable — not the flashiest in the room but never the one who drops something.
CPassionate and occasionally chaotic — brilliant on the hard cases, prone to drama everywhere else. DBrilliant and difficult — right more often than anyone else, and everyone knows it, including me. EWarm and self-deprecating — not the most intimidating presence, but genuinely good at this and easy to like.
NEXT QUESTION → QUESTION 6 / 8RULES 06 How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice. AProtocol is the floor, not the ceiling — I follow it until the patient needs something it can't provide.
BI respect it — the system is broken in places, but the structure is there for a reason and I work within it. CI follow it until my instincts tell me not to — and my instincts are usually right, even when they cause problems. DRules are for people who haven't thought hard enough about when to break them. EI try to follow it and mostly do — with a few memorable exceptions that still come up in meetings.
NEXT QUESTION → QUESTION 7 / 8TOLL 07 What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What's yours? AEverything outside these walls — I've given this job my full attention and the rest of my life has gone around it.
BMy idealism, mostly — I came in believing the system could be fixed and I've made a complicated peace with that. CStability — my personal life has been as chaotic as the OR, and that's not entirely a coincidence. DMy relationships — I am not easy to know, and the people who've tried to would probably agree. EMy sense of gravity — I use humour as a coping mechanism, which not everyone appreciates in a hospital.
NEXT QUESTION → QUESTION 8 / 8PURPOSE 08 At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you. AThe fact that it's real — that nothing else I could be doing would matter this much, right now, today. BThe patients — individual human beings who needed something and got it because I was there.
CThe people I work with — I have walked through impossible things with these people and I'd do it again. DThe next unsolved case — there's always another puzzle, and I'm not done yet. EBecause despite everything — the exhaustion, the loss, the absurdity — I actually love this job. REVEAL MY HOSPITAL → Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In… Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others.
This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center The Pitt You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn't let you look away.
County General Hospital, Chicago ER You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential. Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle Grey's Anatomy You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ House You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn't fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one. Sacred Heart Hospital, California Scrubs You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 'The Dropout' You probably already know the story at the center of Hulu's The Dropout. Watch this dramatization anyway. Amanda Seyfried plays Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, darling of Silicon Valley, wearer of Steve Jobs cosplay, and operator of a blood-testing company whose technology did not work, with an unnerving commitment to the character's strangest affectation: that practiced baritone voice.
Naveen Andrews plays Sunny Balwani, Holmes' mentor-turned-boyfriend, with just enough menace to complicate the show's sympathies. The series is at its sharpest in its early episodes, watching Holmes' charisma outrun her competence in real time. There's a certain horror in seeing intelligent people choose, repeatedly, to believe in something because the alternative — that they were conned by a woman with a fake voice and a turtleneck — is too humiliating to accept.
The show knew exactly when to end, and it ran just long enough for us to know, without a doubt, that Seyfried was robbed at the Emmys.
'Little Fires Everywhere' Reese Witherspoon has never been scarier than she is in Hulu's Little Fires Everywhere, playing a woman who thinks recycling and a pleasant attitude make her a good person. She's Elena Richardson, queen of a manicured Ohio suburb, and Kerry Washington is Mia Warren, the nomadic artist whose arrival in Shaker Heights starts slowly dismantling everything Elena has built.
Based on Celeste Ng's novel, the series digs up uncomfortable truths about race, class, and the damage done by well-meaning white women… and it has the nerve to be genuinely entertaining while doing it. The subtext here isn't especially subtle, but the performances make it sting.
Lexi Underwood and Jade Pettyjohn anchor the younger storyline, and Joshua Jackson wanders through as Elena's husband with the energy of a man who has been dead inside for longer than his wife ever realized. The finale's ending is deeply satisfying, even if the real-life Ng has noted that hers was considerably messier. Sometimes TV improves on the source material.
'The Act' The story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard is anything but simple, and this limited series does that truth justice. Joey King plays the young woman with a physicality that's as uncomfortable as it is impressive, navigating the psychological wreckage of a childhood spent performing disability for a mother who needed her sick. Patricia Arquette, as Dee Dee Blanchard, is terrifying, mostly because she clearly believes every word that comes out of her own mouth.
The show earns its ending by refusing to rush toward it. The first half is almost entirely build-up, filled with doctor's appointments, invented diagnoses, and a wheelchair Gypsy didn't need, and that patience is what makes the aftermath land so hard. The final episodes don't sensationalize Dee Dee’s murder, but they contextualize it, which is more than what most true crime content doesn't have the patience for. Nobody here is innocent and nobody is simply guilty, either.
'Tiny Beautiful Things' Kathryn Hahn has been the best part of everything she's ever been in, and Tiny Beautiful Things finally gives her somewhere to put all of that. She plays Clare, a fictionalized version of writer Cheryl Strayed, dispensing hard-won advice to strangers while her own life and marriage fall apart around her.
Past versions of Clare appear throughout to remind her, and us, exactly how she got here. Hahn plays Clare as a woman who is both wise and wrecked. She can see other people's pain with startling clarity but weirdly remains genuinely blind to the ways she perpetuates her own.
The season finale manages to be devastating and cathartic at once, which is a trick Strayed's writing pulls off repeatedly and which the show, to its considerable credit, actually replicates.
'11.22.63' This is likely the one Hulu series you keep meaning to watch and haven't. Now's the time to correct that. James Franco plays Jake Epping, an English teacher who discovers a time portal in the back of a diner and, as one does, decides to use it to stop Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounds ridiculous and somehow, it works completely.
Sarah Gadon plays Sadie, the woman Jake falls for in 1960s Texas, and their chemistry does considerable heavy lifting in the back half of the series. The show doesn't rush toward that grassy knoll, and it doesn't get so distracted by its own mythology that it forgets to be a story about what we sacrifice when we try to fix things that can't be undone.
For a Stephen King adaptation, which historically ranges from"sublime" to"what were they thinking," it holds together surprisingly well. Like Follow Followed 11.22.63 TV-MA Sci-Fi Drama Release Date 2016 - 2016-00-00 Showrunner James Franco Directors James Franco Writers James Franco Cast See All Main Genre Sci-Fi Seasons 1 Producers James Franco, Joseph Boccia Story By james franco Streaming Service Hulu Executive Producer Bridget Carpenter, Bryan Burk, J.J. Abrams, Kevin Macdonald, Stephen King Powered by Expand Collapse
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