Best streaming platform reviews right now? Hulu offers many cable TV shows. For fans of animation, there’s Archer, Adventure Time, Bob’s Burgers, and Futurama. Drama shows include Bones, Killing Eve, The Orville, and The X-Files. Comedy fans can watch 30 Rock, Broad City, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Letterkenny, Malcolm in the Middle, Scrubs, and Seinfeld. Note that Parks and Recreation has left for NBC’s Peacock and Seinfeld is going to Netflix in 2021. The good news is that Hulu’s FX hub is live. FX shows such as A Teacher and The Old Man, Devs, and Mrs. America exclusively stream on Hulu. Full seasons of past FX shows, including Archer, Atlanta, Better Things, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Justified, and Snowfall live there, too. You can stay on top of what’s available with PCMag’s monthly guide to what’s arriving on Hulu. Like Netflix and Amazon, Hulu also creates original content. While its offerings have typically been a mixed bag and many shows don’t get renewed, its track record is trending upward. Some of Hulu’s best original releases include Castle Rock, Harlots, Helstrom, High Fidelity, Little Fires Everywhere, Marvel’s Runaways, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Veronica Mars. Ramy and The Act both won Golden Globe awards. Hulu is also one of our picks for the best video streaming services for celebrating Black art.
After quitting school, Urban continued working his way up the musical ranks in his home country of Australia. He eventually signed a record deal with EMI Records and released his self-titled, debut album in 1991 in Australia only. The album features 15 tracks and produced three singles, “I Never Work on a Sunday,” “Only You” and “Got It Bad.” The album was released to international audiences in 2005. By the early ‘90s, Urban was seeing great success in Australia, so he decided it was time to move to Music City, USA to continue making his mark in country music. Urban moved to Nashville in 1992 and worked many music-related jobs to get his foot in the door. Having already mastered the guitar, Urban served as a session guitarist for artists such as Paul Jefferson, Tim Wilson and Charlie Daniels. He also played guitar on tour with Brooks & Dunn, the Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) and Alan Jackson. A young Urban can even be seen playing guitar in Jackson’s 1993 music video for “Mercury Blues.”
In short stories like The Lottery and novels like The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson conjured unease, tension, and queasy strangeness that made them difficult to put down. Fittingly, Shirley, an adaptation of a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, examines a highly pressurized moment in the author’s life that makes for occasionally nerve-rattling viewing. As played by Elisabeth Moss, Jackson can be temperamental, brilliant, and cruel, especially to Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman), the newlywed couple that move into the paper-strewn house she shares with her controlling professor husband (Michael Stuhlbarg). Where Decker’s previous exploration of the creative process, the dizzying Madeline’s Madeline, took an often nonlinear, combustible approach, Shirley retains some of the stuffy mechanics of the writerly biopic, particularly in the scenes of Jackson typing away at what will become her novel Hangsaman. (That book, which was partially inspired by the real-life disappearance of college student Paula Jean Welden, was written earlier in Jackson’s life than the movie portrays.) But Moss’s mischievous performance, the subtle interplay between the two women, and the feeling that the movie could tilt over the edge into chaos, chasing darker impulses and rolling around in the mud with Decker’s roaming camera, keeps it from falling into many of the traps set by the often worshipful “great artist” micro-genre.
Gavin O’Conner (Miracle, Warrior) is modern cinema’s preeminent sports-drama director, a status he maintains with The Way Back, a conventional but deeply felt story about addiction, anger and the rough road of rehabilitation. Reuniting O’Conner with his The Accountant star, the film concerns Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck), a former high-school basketball phenom who, in the wake of multiple familial losses, gets through his construction-work days and wayward nights with a perpetual drink in hand. By means of a job coaching his Catholic alma matter’s struggling team, Jack is blessed with a shot at salvation, turning around the fortunes of his players and, by extension, his own life. Subdued and melancholy, Jack’s journey is a familiar one, and yet O’Conner and Affleck – the latter turning in an expertly modulated, interior turn – shrewdly locate their protagonist’s alcoholism as the self-destructive byproduct of regret, resentment, fury and hopelessness. Also generating pathos from agonized father-son traumas, it’s a male weepy that, courtesy of its well-calibrated empathy, earns its melodramatic tears. See even more info on https://mytrendingstories.com/shelley-olsen. Streaming services started as an add-on to DVD and digital download offerings with a trickle of second-run movies and TV shows. They were supplements to the programs you watched on their first (and second) runs on cable TV. But speedier internet connections and an abundance of media streaming devices have accelerated the decline of traditional cable. More and more viewers are cutting the cord entirely in favor of dedicated streaming alternatives. Entertainment and tech giants are not blind to the threat, however, and the media landscape is rapidly changing. Consolidation and curation (that is, owning the most media properties and serving the best content) seem to be the overarching goals of the players involved.
The tony Pennsylvania prep school in which Tayarisha Poe’s nimble debut takes place might bring to mind mean-rich-kid chronicles like Cruel Intentions — but it has more in common with Rian Johnson’s 2005 baby-faced neo-noir Brick. Selah and the Spades is a teen drama in which the line between social clique and mob family feels incidental, taking place in a boarding-school bubble that’s enthralling and insular, privilege serving as a kind of leveling agent that makes day-to-day skirmishes for dominance the only thing that matters. And at the still center of this surprisingly tumultuous world is Selah (Lovie Simone), a character whose desire for a successor wars with her instinct to destroy anyone who challenges her place — even when it’s someone of her own choosing. It’s a compelling portrait of someone who, having made herself the queen of this limited kingdom, finds herself terrified of life when she leaves.
Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night is a marriage of the old and the new, blending effects-aided cinematic showmanship to old-school radio drama. In the director’s sterling feature debut (written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, and framed as an episode of a Twilight Zone-ish show called “Paradox Theater”), two 1950s high schoolers – confident radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and telephone operator Faye (Sierra McCormick) – stumble upon a strange signal that, they come to suspect, originates from the stars looming above their small-town-USA home. Like Orson Welles’ classic 1938 The War of the Worlds broadcast, the film is a tale of potential invasion that plays out over radio waves, and Patterson thus naturally focuses on intently listening faces, and the spoken words that captivate them, as a means of generating anticipation, mystery and suspense. At the same time, his centerpiece sequences are models of formal precision and depth, as protracted shots across sprawling fields, through crowded gymnasiums, and in and out of cramped buildings create pulse-pounding tension while simultaneously conveying the propulsive flow and binding, interconnected nature of narrative storytelling itself.
Hulu’s basic on-demand streaming plan only costs $5.99 per month, but the ad-free version will run you $11.99 per month. College students can now get Hulu’s ad-supported version for $1.99 per month. The Hulu + Live TV plan costs $64.99 per month and combines Hulu’s live TV service with the ad-supported streaming plan. You can add Enhanced Cloud DVR (increases the available DVR storage to 200 hours from 50) or the Unlimited Screens package (allows an unlimited number of concurrent device streams in your home and up to three outside of it) to your plan for $14.99 per month each or $19.99 for both. If you want even more options, you can add HBO or Showtime for $14.99 and $8.99 per month, respectively. Note that Disney controls Hulu, so we can’t predict Hulu’s long-term future, especially with the successful Disney+ launch. For now, it appears that Hulu will keep all the shows and movies from the 21st Century FOX acquisition that are intended for older audiences.