A decade ago, cord-cutters prophesied a world free of exorbitant cable bills where everyone binged The Office without intrusions from advertisers. Now, you have to pay extra to not watch commercials on most streaming services. On Monday, Amazon Prime Video became the latest streamer to embrace the ad tax, tacking …
Read More »The Emmys Proved Streaming Changed TV for the Better
This year’s Emmys marked the event’s 75th anniversary. As part of the festivities, aired Monday night, the ceremony held cast mini-reunions for some of television’s biggest shows: Cheers, The Arsenio Hall Show, Grey’s Anatomy, Martin, even Game of Thrones. It was a testament to the way TV has infiltrated popular …
Read More »2024 Is Going to Be a Rough Year for TV
Numbers tell the story, even if they’re not precise. “About 130”—that’s how many fewer shows Netflix reportedly released last year versus 2022. “Several hundred”—the estimate of how many people Amazon is said to be laying off in the company’s Prime Video and MGM Studios divisions. The number of scripted shows …
Read More »Disney Swears It Can Make Streaming Profitable and Promises a Combined Disney+, Hulu Service
Bob Iger believes. On a call with investors on Wednesday, the Disney CEO said that the company’s goal is to make its streaming business profitable by the end of next year. A big component of that: a new service that combines Disney+ and Hulu, set to launch next spring. This …
Read More »'Reservation Dogs' Is a Vision of Hollywood’s New Normal
In the FX comedy Reservation Dogs, currently midway through its third and final season, the residents of Okern, Oklahoma, are rendered on a glorious scale. They are a collection of oddballs and misfits, lovers and loners, friends and frenemies, wise elders and wise-cracking aunties. To engage their all-encompassing community is …
Read More »The Anticlimactic Death of the Streaming Wars
Maybe A League of Their Own was doomed to strike out. A passion project in all senses of the word, it was a reboot hell-bent on showing the queer lives in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that never made it into the 1992 movie. More succinctly, it was the …
Read More »The 32 Best Movies on Hulu This Week
In 2017, Hulu made television history by becoming the first streaming network to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, thanks to the phenomenon that was The Handmaid’s Tale. While Netflix has largely cornered the streaming market on original movies—and even managed to persuade A-listers like Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Martin Scorsese to …
Read More »The 40 Best Shows on Hulu Right Now
While Netflix seemingly led the way for other streaming networks to create compelling original programming, Hulu actually beat them all to the punch. In 2011, a year before Netflix’s Lilyhammer and two years before the arrival of House of Cards, the burgeoning streamer premiered The Morning After, a pop-culture-focused news …
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