One of Hulu’s newest shows just grabbed a spot in the top 10
One of Hulu’s newest shows just grabbed a spot in the top 10
Hulu’s best shows span dystopian drama, weird comedy, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, and plenty that don’t fit neatly anywhere.
Hulu has always had an interesting mix of shows. You’ve got the Hulu originals, from big dystopian epics to smaller comedies. Then there’s weirder FX and FXX shows — one of which actually grabs the No. 1 spot on this list. Then there’s the ABC offering and animated comedy offering. Basically, there’s a lot to sort through and picking 10 of the best shows of all time on the platform isn’t easy. But I did it and here’s the list. Obviously, your personal list will vary, but here are my picks for the top 10 best shows of all time streaming on Hulu.
Top 10 all-time best TV shows streaming on Hulu:
No. 10: ‘Ramy’ (2019) | Comedy drama
“Ramy” is about a guy who wants very badly to be a good Muslim and then, almost immediately, makes that more difficult for himself. Ramy Hassan is a first-generation Egyptian American in his 20s dealing with faith, family, sex, dating, guilt… usually several of those at the same time, which goes about as well as you’d expect.
Ramy Youssef created the show and plays him, and there’s something almost uncomfortably specific about the whole thing. Ramy will spend an episode genuinely searching for God and then somehow end up lying to somebody, disappointing his parents, making a terrible romantic decision. Sometimes all three. And the show just lets him sit in it. No neat lesson, no little speech explaining what we should take away. He’s trying. He screws up. Then he tries again, possibly worse. It’s funny and sad and occasionally makes you want to yell at him through the TV, which is probably why “Ramy” still feels so different from almost everything else on Hulu.
Ramy
Ramy, the son of Egyptian immigrants, is on a spiritually conflicting journey in his New Jersey neighborhood, pulled between his Muslim community that thinks life is a constant test, his millennial friends who think life is full of endless possibilities, and a God who’s always watching.
No. 9: ‘Atlanta’ (2016) | Comedy drama
“Atlanta” starts with Earn trying to manage his cousin Alfred, aka Paper Boi, right as his rap career starts moving… and then the show just kind of decides it can be about whatever it wants. Money. Race. Fame. Being broke. Some bizarre guy who shows up for five minutes and somehow becomes the whole episode.
Donald Glover keeps changing the rules on you, which is maybe the best thing about it. One week you’re watching Earn deal with some very normal, depressing life problem. The next week the show has drifted so far into something surreal that you’re sitting there thinking, wait, are we still in the same series? Somehow, yes. “Atlanta” can be funny, bleak, stupid, sharp, uncomfortable, occasionally almost dream logic… and it never seems particularly worried about making all of that fit together neatly. And I love that. Most shows tell you what they are pretty quickly. “Atlanta” keeps refusing.
Atlanta
In this wildly imaginative show from creator Donald Glover, a one-hit wonder hip-hop artist and his cousin navigate the world of small-time fame in the music industry. “Atlanta” is impossible to categorize - alternately funny, touching, strange, surreal, and perceptive. Each episode switches tone, serving almost as a standalone film featuring recurring characters. There are no rules on “Atlanta” - Justin Bieber is Black, invisible cars exist - the world is whatever Glover needs it to be for that particular episode. This gem is one of the most inventive shows on TV.
No. 8: ‘Furious’ (2026) | Thriller
It’s rare for a brand-new show to make an all-time best list, never mind a show that hasn’t even finished airing Season 1 at the time of this writing! But to hell with convention because when you watch “Furious” — the new series from creator Elizabeth Meriwether, you’ll get it. A quick look at her previous TV credits gives you an idea of just how crazy talented she is, from “New Girl” to “The Dropout” to “Dying For Sex.” The woman pumps out quality TV with the best of them, and she’s done it again with “Furious,” in an entirely different genre no less.
The series is wrapped in a serial killer cat-and-mouse chase, with Alice, an FBI agent played by Emmy Rossum, trying to catch Catherine, a female serial killer played by Lola Petticrew who’s going after men she thinks got away with sex crimes. Besides being extremely entertaining and unpredictable (unlike most conventional crime thrillers, it’s very hard to guess what happens next), the show looks at the justice system around sex crimes and asks you to make a moral call on what’s right and wrong when there’s so much grey. How will these women get justice, and who will get it for them? The answer isn’t clear. It will have you bouncing between cheering for Alice one minute, before hoping Catherine gets away with her next crime and can regroup to do it again. Very few shows have the power to make you an active participant, and the ones that do are a special breed. “Furious” is just that. Watch it.
Furious
FBI agent Alice Black is on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating female serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur.
No. 7: ‘Reservation Dogs’ (2021) | Comedy-drama
“Reservation Dogs” is about four teenagers on an Oklahoma reservation who are trying to get to California after their friend dies. That’s the plan, anyway. Mostly they steal things, come up with bad schemes, get annoyed with each other, wander around, talk crap… grief kind of sitting there the whole time whether anybody wants to deal with it or not. Usually not.
And the show never gets weirdly precious about any of this, which I love. These kids are Native, yes, and that matters enormously, but they’re also allowed to be dumb and selfish and funny and pissed off and occasionally completely exhausting. You know, teenagers. “Reservation Dogs” only runs three seasons and then just… ends when it should. No dragging everybody through six more years because somebody found an audience. People grow up. Some leave, some don’t. Things change without suddenly becoming tidy. Which feels about right.
Reservation Dogs
Four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma steal, rob and save in order to get to the exotic, mysterious and faraway land of California.
No. 6: ‘The Bear’ (2022) | Drama
“The Bear” is officially over, which still feels a little strange because this show spent years making a restaurant kitchen feel like some kind of ongoing emergency we were all trapped inside. Awards can call it a comedy for as long as they want but I’m not eating it. Jeremy Allen White plays Carmy, a high-end chef who comes home after his brother dies and takes over the family sandwich shop, and pretty quickly everybody is yelling, tickets are stacking up, somebody screwed up an order, Carmy looks like he hasn’t slept in six weeks… very normal restaurant stuff.
But then the show would suddenly stop. Somebody sits alone. Somebody remembers something. The kitchen disappears for a minute and now you’re watching a story about grief or family or what ambition does to a person when they don’t know when to quit. That was always the trick with “The Bear.” It made dinner service feel like life or death and then quietly reminded you the food was never really the problem.
The Bear
Carmy, a young fine-dining chef, comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop. As he fights to transform the shop and himself, he works alongside a rough-around-the-edges crew that ultimately reveal themselves as his chosen family.
No. 5: ‘The Americans’ (2013) | Spy drama
“The Americans” is technically a spy show, and there are wigs and dead drops and people getting followed through parking garages, all that stuff. But honestly, after a few episodes I stopped caring about the spy mechanics nearly as much as I cared about whether Elizabeth and Philip actually loved each other. Which is a weird question because they’re Soviet KGB agents whose entire marriage started as an assignment.
Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys spend the Cold War pretending to be this boring suburban couple in Washington, D.C., except… they have kids now. They have a house. They have arguments that sound like regular married-people arguments until you remember one of them may have murdered somebody two hours earlier. That’s “The Americans.” The lies keep multiplying, but somehow the marriage gets more real inside all of them. Or maybe it doesn’t. The show never makes that easy. By the end you’re not really wondering whether they’ll get caught so much as whether any part of the life they built actually belongs to them. And then it ends exactly when it should, which almost never happens. Easy all-time Hulu pick.
The Americans
Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple in the suburbs of Washington D.C. and their neighbor, Stan Beeman, an FBI Counterintelligence agent.
No. 4: ‘DAVE’ (2020) | Comedy
At first, “Dave” sounds like it should be one long joke. It’s a show about Lil Dicky trying to convince the world he belongs in hip-hop, which could’ve gone wrong in about 50 different ways. But once you actually start watching, there’s way more going on. The show is messy, awkward, deeply uncomfortable, and completely ridiculous, but underneath all of that is a surprisingly honest story about insecurity, ambition, ego, and wanting to be taken seriously. The emotional moments sneak up on you, too.
That Season 2 finale with GaTa is still the kind of episode that sticks in your brain because it’s really about friendship, loyalty, and remembering the people who believed in you before anyone else did. So if you wrote this one off because of the premise, I get it. But give it another shot. It’s easily one of the most unexpectedly sincere shows in the Hulu lineup.
DAVE
A suburban neurotic man in his late 20s has convinced himself that he’s destined to be one of the best rappers of all time. Now he must convince his closest friends, because with their help, he might actually convince the world.
No. 3: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (2017) | Dystopian drama
My wife and I watched “The Handmaid’s Tale” together from beginning to end, and even though the finale is a little quieter than I thought it’d be, it does the show justice. When this show is really working, it’s almost too much to handle, and that’s a compliment. Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, it follows June as she tries to survive Gilead — a horrifying regime where women lose their freedom and are forced into reproductive slavery. It’s intense, bleak, and not exactly what I’d call a relaxing watch, but wow, does it pull you in.
Elisabeth Moss carries the whole thing with this locked-in, relentless performance, and the rest of the cast meets her there. The show is heavy, but it’s heavy for a reason. It’s about control, resistance, survival, and what people are willing to endure when everything has been taken from them. Not an easy binge, but absolutely one of Hulu’s essential dramas.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship. A TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel.
This harrowing series features dynamite performances from Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Joseph Fiennes, and Ann Dowd. The show’s first season won 8 Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series.
No. 2: ‘Only Murders in the Building’ (2021) | Comedy mystery
Murder mystery comedies are so easy to mess up because you can’t just have funny people wandering around a crime scene. The mystery actually has to work, too. That’s why “Only Murders in the Building” is such a miracle. It’s through Season 5 now, and somehow it still feels fresh. The cases keep getting twistier, the guest stars keep getting more ridiculous (and more famous), and Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez are still the whole reason this thing sings. Their chemistry is cozy, weird, dry, and oddly sweet all at once.
The newer seasons have pushed the mystery into more personal territory without losing the jokes, and the show still has that perfect “one more episode” energy. It’s clever, funny, suspenseful, and basically the ideal Hulu binge.
Only Murders in the Building
Three strangers share an obsession with true crime and suddenly find themselves wrapped up in one.
No. 1: ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ (2005) | Sitcom
“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” isn’t just one of the best shows on Hulu. It’s one of the great TV comedies, period. For me, it’s sitting right there with “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is about as high as praise gets. The whole trick is that the gang never really learns anything. Mac, Dee, Charlie, Dennis, and Frank are awful from the beginning, and now 18 seasons later, they’re still awful — maybe worse!
They run a dive bar in Philly, make terrible plans, ruin other people’s lives, ruin their own lives, and somehow keep coming back louder and more committed than before. It’s dark, stupid, sharp, fearless, and completely itself. If you like comedy that refuses to behave, this is one of the best ever made.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Four egocentric friends run a neighborhood Irish pub in Philadelphia and try to find their way through the adult world of work and relationships. Unfortunately, their warped views and precarious judgments often lead them to trouble, creating a myriad of uncomfortable situations that usually only get worse before they get better.