Published June 17, 2026, 3:00 p.m. ET

The new Hulu drama The Season is an English-language thriller from Hong Kong that is basically a “rich people being awful” series, but it’s built around the city’s society sailing season. Can viewers connect with yet another show about the problems that these people have that even money can’t solve?

THE SEASON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The Hong Kong skyline at night. The voice of Coleen “Cola” Pierce (Jessie Mei Li) talks about how “Hong Kong is a city of bloodlines.” We see her floating in the water unconscious while a yacht that’s on fire starts to submerge.

The Gist: Six weeks earlier, Cola is about to start a summer job with Carrie Shen (Celina Jade), who owns a wealth management company in the city. It’s the start of sailing season in the city, where deals are made among the city’s elite, and networking during yacht-based social events is crucial. Carrie is going to bring Cola to the first event, thrown by the Hext family, who rule the society scene. One false move or one wrong thing said could ruin Cola’s standing — and, by association, Carrie’s — for the entire season.

Fiona Hext (Karena Lam) is the one who determines who keeps being invited back and who gets banished. Her husband Christopher (Toby Stephens) would rather tend to his business empire than deal with society BS. But they both have smiles on their faces as they greet their guests for the opening of the season. Among them is Carrie and Cola, but also David Ho (Justin Chien), a lawyer just got a divorce and is considered Hong Kong’s “most eligible bachelor,” Andrew Fung (Chris Pang), a hotel magnate and David’s best friend, and his wife Nikita (Reina Sawai).

Cola snoops around the Hexts’ stateroom during the cruise and almost gets caught by one of the ship’s officers. She also gets suspicious when the family’s head of security, Jon Kim (Lee Jae-yoon), tells her not to take a selfie.

Things are not all well with the Hexts, either, as Fiona laments the fact that her neice, Madeline Wong (Yvonne Chapman), is at the party. Madeline is returning to Hong Kong to deal with the legal aftermath of her husband’s death, but a scandal has made her the black sheep of the family.

At lunch at a seaside restaurant, we get a sense of how judgemental the Hexts and everyone around them is. Carrie makes sure to let Cola know in her own not-so-subtle way to not engage with the guests that she knows Fiona will ban. Back on board, Cola says she lost her jade earrings, a gift from her father, setting in motion a search and an exercise in who can be trusted.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Season, created by Yalun Tu, has a very similar feel to The White Lotus.

Our Take: Much of the first episode of The Season progressed in the way shows about rich people being terrible usually do. We see the people being terrible, men being sexist pigs, secret affairs being kept secret, and we just shrugged our shoulders. Everything about it gave us a “who gives a crap?” feeling. Sure, we get some interesting views of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and other parts of the region, but none of the intrigue felt all that interesting.

Then we get the last scene of the first episode, where Cola visits her father (Carl Ng) in prison and tells him “I’m home,” and things change. Instead of being about an ingenue observing all of the awfulness that is going on around here, she’s a determined young woman who is looking for revenge. Sure, Cola might be also there to up her profile in society, but she’s doing so with a persona that’s at least partly fiction.

That is certainly more intriguing to us than just observing how terrible the Hexts and their friends are to “the poors” and to each other. Whether it’s intriguing enough to carry the six episode first season is another matter. As all of the backstabbing, pretending, and other shenanigans come to light, the show may become a campy, delicious thriller to take in, or it may just continue to be a boring show about boring rich people. At this point, we’re not sure.

Performance Worth Watching: We get hints that Jessie Mei Li’s Cola is less naive than she seems at first glance, but Li does a good job of blancing what Cola really knows while projecting a manner that tells Carrie and others that she’s there to absorb whatever she can in order to get ahead.

Sex And Skin: There’s some sexiness between Madeline and one of the other guests, but no skin.

Parting Shot: Like we mentioned above, Cola visits her father in prison and says in Cantonese, “I’m home.”

Sleeper Star: Justin Chen’s David Ho is positioned as a “good guy,” but we’re not sure if that’s just a smokescreen or not. Also, he seems to be into Carrie, who is crushingly lonely and would rather hook up with randos than commit to anything.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Dumb name, great body,” Andrew says to David about Cola.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re still not 100% sold on The Season being a show that’s going to be anything more than a moderately-entertaining distraction that’s sprinkled with some leaden dialogue and meh acting. But at least the last scene of the first episode gives us hope that the awful people in the story will be balanced by a protagonist we actually want to root for.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.