Does Disney Have A HULU Problem?

Now That The Streamer Is Fully Integrated Into Disney+, It Desperately Needs New Hits.

Paradise recently concluded it’s first season on Hulu and going by the data and Nielsen ratings, it is a hit for the streamer. 

20th Century Television and Hulu can now breathe a big sign of relief. 

Phew.

You see, Paradise was a VERY important show for Hulu Originals.

20th Century Television and Hulu PR went all out since the show premiered on January 26th to ensure the show was perceived as a smash. They dropped the first episode early to build buzz and even aired it on linear channels ABC and FX. They had the trades and other publications constantly doing recaps and interviews to keep the show in the news cycle after each episode. Even in the last week they announced the entire first season will air on ABC.

Very few Hulu originals get this treatment, primarily because most Hulu originals aren’t watched by a large audience. 

For being one of the best-known and oldest streaming services, surprisingly little is written about Hulu’s original programming slate. I think most people would be surprised to learn that there aren’t many major hits, especially compared to platforms like Netflix, Amazon, or even Paramount+, which can boast several top-rated shows on the Nielsen charts—all from the Taylor Sheridan universe. Landman has been a massive success and one of the highest-rated shows in all of streaming over the past few months.

And no, I am not counting FX shows, FX on Hulu, or whatever they’re calling John Landgraf’s slate these days. Those shows are overseen by a completely different set of executives and have one of the best track records in television history, even though they could probably use more viewers. 

While FX has had a few stumbles as its slate expanded after being acquired by Disney, it had an epic 2024, with Shōgun, continued awards recognition and strong viewership for The Bear, an incredible final season of What We Do in the Shadows, and the most underrated show of the year with Say Nothing.

In a world where Amazon just fired their head of content Jen Salke, when she could at least boast about 3 or 4 massive hits on the platform, the Dana Walden (And Salke’s very good friend) led Hulu has a lot less to brag about.

What Is Considered A Hit On Hulu?

Getting back to Paradise –  A few days after the show premiered, Hulu released a press release stating that the first episode drew 7 million viewers in its first nine days of streaming—an unusual move, as Hulu almost never releases ratings directly for their shows. They then renewed it for Season 2 after six of the eight episodes had aired.

Paradise is definitely doing well for a HULU show, but is 7 million viewers for the first week actually good? They have come out and said that in the first two months the number went up to 17.6 million.

This Is Us, from the same creator of Paradise, Dan Fogelman, had 14.3 million viewers in its first week when it premiered in 2016 on NBC. Seven million is around what the highest-rated CBS shows get in overnight ratings. However, at the same time, Hulu reported that The Bear Season 3 premiere garnered 5.4 million views on Hulu and Disney+ in its first four days of streaming, so I guess the Paradise number is pretty strong. 

The show has been a consistent presence on the Nielsen charts averaging around 7.5-9 million views a week for all of the episodes that have aired totaled and the finale got 6.3M views globally in seven days (so less then the premiere?) Which is significantly less than the recently canceled The Recruit on Netflix.  

I also noticed that towards the end of its run, the newest episodes of Paradise ranked  below ABC shows The Rookie and Will Trent on the HULU top 15 the day after it aired. And it has only occasionally appeared on the Hulu charts after the season concluded. 

Streaming ratings and determining what is a hit can be very very confusing!!

Another interesting data point—while far from proven—can often indicate a show’s popularity – on IMDb, Paradise has 29,000 user ratings after two months, whereas Netflix’s Adolescence had 30,000 after a week.

But Netflix is obviously a behemoth, and it’s difficult to compare a Hulu show to anything on Netflix. Seven million viewers is always going to sound minuscule when Netflix touts that a show like American Primeval garnered 1.4 billion minutes watched in its first week. And yes, I know these are different metrics, that American Primeval number accounts for all ten episodes, and that Hulu has far fewer subscribers, mostly in the U.S. 

But still, when you read these numbers in press releases, it’s hard not to compare. The New York Times recently published an entire piece about how difficult streaming ratings are to decipher. And I am a huge fan of The Entertainment Strategy guy, whoI am sure won’t be very surprised by anything I write in this article. 

What Shows Are Working On Hulu?

The Hulu Originals slate—which has been overseen by Craig Erich and Jordan Helman until recently, and mostly produced by the Dana Walden and Karey Burke-led 20th Century Television, along with the now-defunct ABC Signature—has had a rough time in the years following Disney’s acquisition of Fox, as well as the multiple reorganizations and studio mergers that followed. And yes, 20th is the studio behind a few FX shows, but mostly through Ryan Murphy (more on him later) or projects that originated with Fox 21, another Disney-owned studio that was folded into 20th.

Did you know that Only Murders in the Building, also executive-produced by Fogelman, is currently the Hulu Originals team’s only legitimate hit? It’s their only show that consistently appears on various viewership charts, including Nielsen, and also receives awards recognition. So congrats Dan Fogelman, you are the one savior of the Hulu originals slate!

Yes, that’s a slight embellishment—but not far from the truth. The Handmaid’s Tale is returning in April for its sixth season after a two-year hiatus. While it still pulls in decent viewership, it feels like it hasn’t been culturally relevant since maybe Season 3. That show is also from MGM—or now, MGM/Amazon—and originated under at least three Hulu regimes ago, long before Disney took full ownership of Hulu. But yay, there’s a spinoff on the way, because that’s exactly what people are craving!

They also renewed Reasonable Doubt and Tell Me Lies, which are solid shows and frequently appear on Hulu’s daily Top 15—but never on Nielsen or other major ratings charts. For comparison, on IMDb, Reasonable Doubt has only 3.1k user ratings after two seasons, while Tell Me Lies has 12k after two seasons. That means Adolescence had more ratings than both of them combined after only a week.

Hulu also has a new season of Nine Perfect Strangers in production—four years after the first season. And I was shocked to see that The Orville is coming back?! Yes, the Seth MacFarlane space series that aired its first two seasons on Fox. Apparently, there was a third season on Hulu in 2022, but I have no recollection of it. The stories I’ve heard about that show’s budget over the years—oof.

But that’s pretty much it for returning shows, aside from popular animated series like Futurama and Solar Opposites (which was ironically just canceled), which perform well for them. It should be noted that animated shows like Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers are constantly at the top of the Neilson acquired shows chart, which means people definitely know how to find the streamer. 

Their list of flops over the past few years is far longer than their list of hits. Interior Chinatown, La Maquina, Under the Bridge, We Were the Lucky Ones, Death and Other Details, Black Cake, Saint X, Tiny Beautiful Things, Mike, How to Die Alone, The Other Black Girl, and Reboot—all flops. Even shows that managed to get a second season, like Unprisoned, This Fool( I loved that show!), and Life & Beth, should still be classified as disappointments. Not to mention the numerous U.K. co-productions they’ve launched in recent years. Many of these shows were really good with great reviews, but for whatever reason, Hulu couldn’t get people to tune in.

Interior Chinatown was the most surprising failure. It almost felt like Hulu and 20th didn’t want anyone to know it existed. The project had been a high-profile development, with multiple producers and studios chasing the book rights. Even my friends at 20th were hyping it up months before its release, calling it one of their favorite things they were working on. It had an Oscar-winning pilot director and executive producer (Taika Waititi) and shared a lot of creative DNA with Everything Everywhere All at Once. Even the reviews were mostly positive—no one was ecstatic about it, but it was generally well-received.

And yet, there was barely any marketing, hardly any press, and when I went to watch it a week after its premiere… it was nowhere on the Hulu homepage. Even long-canceled shows like Shut Eye and Woke were being promoted, but not the brand-new series that had just been released. I literally had to search for it, and it didn’t even show up until I got to the second “I” in Interior. I wish I were exaggerating—but I’m not.

What Hulu Should Be Making

Paradise is exactly the kind of show Hulu should be making. I have my issues with it and found much of it too ridiculous for my taste, but it’s definitely watchable and entertaining enough, with a standout performance from Sterling K. Brown, who is tremendous in everything.

Side note about Sterling K. Brown—my favorite part of his Paradise promotional tour was his story about how he had been focused solely on his film career, but Fogelman’s script was so good that it convinced him to return to television. The only issue with that? Brown starred in and produced a limited series for Hulu called Washington Black, which started filming in 2022, and there has been virtually no mention of it since production wrapped. It still has no release date—almost three years after it began shooting. Will it ever see the light of day? Someone should definitely ask Dana Walden about this!

Paradise feels like a broadcast genre show from the early 2000s, when every season there were two or three new series trying to become the next Lost. Paradise would rank in the upper tier of those shows—about as good as FlashForward, Invasion, and The River, but much better than Alcatraz, The Event, Under the Dome, Revolution, and Threshold. If Fringe counts as part of that trend, then that was by far the best of the bunch. And sure, let’s count the first season of Heroes too.

Fogelman is slightly out of his depth with this show—it’s his first series incorporating thriller and genre elements, and those are the areas where it stumbled. He excels at character work and emotional beats, but his reliance on constant flashbacks and monologuing—hallmarks of his style—felt forced here, disrupting the pacing and momentum of the story. The show tried to pack in too much narrative, which diminished the stakes of the murder mystery at its core and made the present-day storyline feel rushed and escalate too quickly. It’s a show that felt incredibly small and incredibly big at the same time, which is not a good thing.

But I will say that the penultimate episode was outstanding (though I think it would have benefited from coming earlier in the season), and I feel confident it will go down as one of the best TV episodes of the year. The finale… definitely a mixed bag. While watching, I was engaged—it had soooo many trademarks of This Is Us, focusing on a random character and telling an emotional story underscored by treacly music. But once it revealed its hand and laid out everything about the murder mystery, my eyes started to roll.

When I told my wife—who had given up on the show after three episodes—how everything was resolved, she looked at me and said, “That might be the dumbest thing I have ever heard.” But I still think it kind of worked in the moment, even though I know I was manipulated!

That said, Fogelman is a great writer who knows how to craft an entertaining show, and as I mentioned, Paradise is very watchable. Since 2025 has been lacking in standout new series, it was nice to have something decent enough to look forward to each week. 

Fogelman has had a fascinating career—he’s low-key one of the most successful writers of the past twenty-five years, yet doesn’t get nearly enough credit. I highly recommend aspiring writers study his scripts and career as something to strive for.

He’s often just associated with This Is Us since it was a cultural phenomenon (and a show I adored, watching every episode). But Fogelman was also the king of the spec script market in the early 2000s, selling screenplays like Fred Claus, Crazy, Stupid, Love, Last Vegas, and The Guilt Trip for massive sums. He successfully transitioned into animation, writing Cars, Bolt, and Tangled, and created multiple TV series that made it to air—The Neighbors, Galavant, and Pitch. 

While those shows were solid, they struggled to find an audience. Surprisingly, the one area where Fogelman has stumbled is directing—his 2018 film Life Itself was one of the biggest misfires ever to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and Danny Collins, a little-seen Al Pacino film about a rocker who receives a letter from John Lennon, barely got a theatrical release.

The main reason Hulu should be making more shows with a broadcast sensibility like Paradise is that the only content that consistently performs well on Hulu is… broadcast television. The majority of the series appearing in Hulu’s Top 15 are ABC shows like High Potential (a nice swan song for ABC Signature), The Rookie (eOne/Lionsgate), Abbott Elementary (WBTV), Will Trent (20th), 9-1-1 (20th), and to an extent Doctor Odyssey (20th), with occasional appearances from Fox dramas like Doc and Rescue: Hi-Surf. The new Tim Allen series Shifting Gears (20th) has also performed well on both Hulu and ABC and just got renewed.

If viewers are already coming to Hulu for procedurals, sitcoms, and light entertainment, why wouldn’t the Hulu Originals team lean into that success? You could argue that the platform already has enough of those types of shows through its broadcast pipeline, but why not take that formula and do something slightly different? 

Hulu recently merged its development team with ABC, appointing Simran Sethi as its new president. Sethi was previously the EVP of programming at ABC and continues to report to Craig Erwich, another key Dana Walden lieutenant. Given their backgrounds in broadcast development, this could very well be the direction Hulu is headed.

And I’ll get ABC credit, which Dana Walden also runs, it’s very consistent and there shows do fine, but nothing in the last few years has been that buzzy since Abbott Elementary. They renewed a majority of their shows for next season, but all their new series orders have been spin-offs. There were practically no pilots ordered this season. 

What Hulu should be doing is something more akin to the extremely popular USA Network shows from the early 2000s—character-centric procedurals with serialized storylines. Or something slightly more elevated, like The Pitt on Max, which is essentially a medical procedural on steroids. 

Surprisingly, not a single streamer has even attempted an emotional family drama in the vein of Parenthood or This Is Us, which I think would do incredibly well on Hulu. Maybe they could even take up the mantle of the now-defunct CW—if the Buffy reboot actually happens, that would be a great way to launch a similar slate. They’re also in the process of rebooting Prison Break, which doesn’t particularly excite me, but it’s a smart choice, even though they already tried to Prison Break and it was a huge failure. Oof

Let FX be the prestige content provider—they excel at it and deliver enough high-quality shows each year. Hulu Originals, on the other hand, should focus on broader, more accessible programming that attracts a larger audience and appeals to the viewers who are already coming to the platform each week. 

Looking at their upcoming slate, however, it seems like more of the same. They have multiple true crime limited series based on the Natalia Grace ( which just premiered to middling reviews, but will prob get fine ratings) Alex Murdaugh, and Amanda Knox cases—a trend I personally hate, but one that must have been successful for them since they produced the The Act, The Girl from Plainville, and The Dropout.

Beyond that, they have Deli Boys, a new crime comedy from Onyx that just premiered and barely made a blip on their top 15; a legal drama from Ryan Murphy starring Kim Kardashian; Chad Powers, a sports comedy with Glenn Powell that should perform well; and the new multi-cam sitcom from the Will & Grace creators. That last one is a smart choice— they should be doing more multi-cams – except when you realize that Will & Grace is the only successful show the creators have ever made, while the eight other shows they created were flops. 

And that’s… kind of it, from what I can tell. A lot is riding on Noah Hawley’s Alien show, but I count that as FX, even though 20th is the studio, since it controlled the Alien IP.  The rest of their development slate looks like a carbon copy of every other streamer’s playbook—adapt IP, attach an A-list actor, and hope for the best. Just copying the old HBO playbook.

It’s surprising that Dana Walden has allowed Hulu Originals to be in this position, with so few hits under their belt. She is one of the most esteemed executives in Hollywood and a potential heir apparent to Bob Iger, yet she hasn’t delivered as many standout shows as you’d expect from someone of her stature. 

Yes, you can blame COVID, the strikes, industry upheaval, and Disney’s internal drama. It may also have something to do with waiting for Disney to take full ownership of Hulu. But none of that excuses the sheer number of underwhelming shows the platform has put out over the last few years. It’s clear that Walden is aware of the issue, as she’s made significant executive changes in the past year. We’ll see what kind of shows Simran Sethi develops and whether she can right the ship.

Suzanna Makkos was also recently named Head of Comedy, which is an intriguing choice. She played a key role in the success of Hacks at Max and was responsible for some of Fox’s best comedies—Brooklyn Nine-Nine, New Girl, The Last Man on Earth, and The Mindy Project. It’s probably not a coincidence that her first major pickup at Hulu was another Mindy Kaling comedy—which is a big win for WBTV, since Hulu rarely picks up shows from outside studios.

That said, Walden has always been a far better seller than she has been at picking projects. She spent most of her career on the studio side, delivering numerous hits to Fox. I always found it funny that two of her biggest successes, This Is Us and Modern Family, were made for outside networks when everything I’ve ever been taught is that studios should be delivering hits for their parent company’s platforms. The same can be said about two of her current biggest studio hits, Tracker and Nobody Wants This. Why weren’t those shows on ABC and Hulu? 

Allegedly, Hulu passed on Nobody Wants This, which is baffling—especially when you consider that, outside of Only Murders in the Building, their most successful comedy based on episode count was… Casual. A decent show, sure, but one that barely anyone remembers.

While there’s certainly money to be made by selling to outside networks, it still seems counterproductive when Hulu is struggling to produce hit originals of its own. After all, delivering hit shows to rival networks is exactly what got Bela Bajaria fired from NBCUniversal—which, ironically, led her to become one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood at Netflix.

When Walden finally became the head of Fox Network alongside Gary Newman in 2014 and gained the power to greenlight projects, the shows she made included Minority Report, Scream Queens, Rosewood, Grandfathered, Cooper Barrett’s Guide to Surviving Life, Second Chance, Lucifer (which only became a hit after moving to Netflix), Son of Zorn, Lethal Weapon, Making History, APB, Ghosted, The Gifted, Rel, The Cool Kids, The Resident (her biggest hit), and The Passage. Not a single culture-defining success.

Compare that to Gail Berman’s tenure as Fox’s network head, during which she greenlit American Idol, Arrested Development, Bones, House, The O.C., Prison Break, 24, Hell’s Kitchen, and American Dad. Or Kevin Reilly, who delivered Fringe, Glee, New Girl, The Following, Bob’s Burgers, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Empire, Gotham, and The Cleveland Show.

Yes, Dana Walden played a huge role in many of those shows as a studio head, but ultimately, the greenlight came from the network head. While I know that broadcast television has changed a lot over the years and it has become much harder to deliver hit shows like the ones from twenty years ago, that list of shows she greenlit as network head is not great under any circumstances.

Delivering successful shows for Disney+ has also proven more difficult than expected. The streamer doesn’t seem particularly interested in producing a large volume of content. While Marvel and Star Wars projects—produced directly by Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm—have been a consistent presence, original series outside of those franchises have struggled. Hits like Percy Jackson (20th’s one true Disney+ success) and Goosebumps (Sony) are the exceptions. 

Meanwhile, a longer list of disappointments includes The Mysterious Benedict Society, Turner & Hooch, Big Shot, Doogie Kameāloha, Just Beyond, The Mighty Ducks, The Crossover, and American Born Chinese, Diary of a Future President, Muppets Mayhem. So far, only a handful of new projects—like a Holes and Malcolm in the Middle reboot—have been announced. There’s likely more in development, but given Disney’s focus on streaming, you’d expect its main television studio to be producing a higher volume of high-profile content for the platform.

Where Walden has truly excelled—and what has made her such a successful and exceptional executive—is in her relationships with showrunners and creators. At the top of that list is, of course, Ryan Murphy, who has had 16 projects on air with Dana Walden, with at least five more on the way. Despite his brief defection to Netflix, he was wooed back and remains by far the most prolific producer-creator in Hollywood. Steve Levitan has been with the studio forever and remains invaluable, delivering new shows and mentoring emerging writers like Sara Foster. 

Similarly, longtime collaborators like Dan Fogelman, Jonathan Steinberg, and Liz Meriwether, Lee Daniels Jenni Konner among other under overalls—along with directors such as Jason Winer (who might have just left?) and Jake Kasdan—have played key roles in some of the studio’s biggest hits. Keeping top-tier creative talent happy and providing them with the resources to deliver major successes is essential to the studio and is Walden’s most important asset. 

In today’s shrinking television marketplace, where—on a good day—you might have seven viable buyers for a non-broadcast show (though the last few pitches I took out only had five), it’s critical that no more streamers shut down and that they continue to produce a healthy number of series. 

Writers and production companies simply won’t be able to survive if the number of shows being made continues to decline at the rate it has. Streamers need to focus on branding and creating content that audiences actually want to watch—and making it clear where they can find it.

Whether Paradise is as popular as reported in the press remains up for debate, but it is undeniably an important series for both its studio and network. Hopefully, it will steer Hulu Originals in a more positive direction—one that allows them to deliver the hits they desperately need to stay competitive with the more high-profile streaming services.