Hulu’s ‘The White Lotus’ Replacement ‘The Season’ Only Offers Glimpses of a Better Thriller

We’ll cop to our bias up front: put a few billionaires on a deck with champagne and long-held grudges, and we’re fully seated, snacks in hand. There is a reliable pleasure in watching very rich people behave very badly… especially at sea. Hulu‘s The Season knows this, and for a while, it coasts on it. The show drops you onto a rotating fleet of mega yachts that Hong Kong’s billionaires apparently float out whenever the air conditioning in their high-rises gives out under a warming sky, and it lets you gawk at the wealth, the wardrobe, and the skyline glittering behind it all. The gawking is good; the trouble starts the moment anyone opens their mouth.

‘The Season’ Drops an American Outsider Into Hong Kong’s Elite

Our way into this world is Cola (Jessie Mei Li), an economics major fresh off the plane from Chicago, here to interview for a wealth-management job with one of the city’s dynastic families. The interview, naturally, unfolds across a string of society parties on different sundecks, because in The Season, no business is ever conducted anywhere a helicopter can’t land.

The family in question are the Hexts, presided over by the formidable Fiona (Karena Lam) and orbited by a familiar constellation of soap-opera satellites: Christopher Hext (Toby Stephens), whose bank balance is in worse shape than his marriage; Madeline (Yvonne Chapman), Fiona’s niece; Andrew (Chris Pang), who is having an affair with Madeline; and David Ho (Justin Chien), billed without irony as Hong Kong’s most eligible bachelor, freshly divorced and nursing a broken heart while he and the watchful Carrie (Celina Jade) circle each other in a will-they dance you can set your watch to.

Cola, it turns out, is not the wide-eyed striver she’s selling. She’s been quietly lifting family photographs off the Hexts’ yacht, and it becomes clear her interest in this family’s empire runs a good deal deeper than their investment portfolio. She has history with these people, the kind that comes loaded with debt, and she’s slipped into their world to settle it from the inside. It’s a sturdy engine for a series: outsider infiltrates the castle, learns the secrets, plots to burn it all down. Trouble is, The Season can’t find the throttle.

Setting Is ‘The Season’s Biggest Strength, but the Writing Sinks the Whole Thing

Image via Hulu

Let’s start with what works, because some things here do. The Season looks spectacular, and more to the point, it looks like a place we rarely get to see rendered this lovingly. Hong Kong on American television usually means a rain-slicked alley in the back half of a superhero movie, lit blue and shot at midnight. Here the city gets daylight, glamour, and depth: the harbor at golden hour, the vertical sprawl of the skyline, interiors so polished you could lose an afternoon just marveling at the architecture. Whoever scouted these locations, we guarantee, they weren’t paid enough. There are stretches where you could mute the dialogue, let the visuals wash over you, and have a perfectly pleasant time — which is convenient, because muting the dialogue is a tempting option.

The writing in The Season has a way of announcing itself so loudly, you’ll beg for a case of swimmer’s ear. People do not speak so much as deliver, and they deliver in a register no human being has ever used at a yacht party. “What scintillating information will you be regaling our guests with?” one character asks another. Sure, these people may have teethed on silver spoons, but no one, no matter how rich, talks like this.

Early on, it’s even worse, because the dialogue is also doing the heavy lifting of introducing you to this world: who these people are, how they’re connected, why any of it matters. Everyone’s so busy explaining the place that nobody gets to just live in it, and you end up watching actors gamely trying to sell human interaction rather than people actually having a conversation. You could turn it into a drinking game, taking a sip every time someone solemnly reminds another character how vital it is to perform well during the all-important social calendar known as The Season. We’ll warn you now: you won’t make it to the second commercial break.

That’s not just a line-by-line problem, either. It’s baked into how the pilot is built. Characters arrive preloaded with backstory they recite at one another, relationships get announced instead of shown, and the whole hour has the airless quality of a table read where everyone’s making very sure you catch their character’s defining trait. It’s all tell. What it needs is the confidence to throw viewers in the deep end and trust us to find the transom ladder ourselves.

‘The Season’ Has Bigger Influences Than It Can Live Up To

Image via Hulu

When The Season loosens up, you can feel the better show flickering underneath. There’s a running bit in the premiere where Cola appears to lose a pair of sentimental earrings, and the party promptly turns the search into a competitive game, the kind of casually cruel entertainment the idle rich invent when they’ve run out of other distractions. The Season has ideas; it just hasn’t figured out how to get out of its own way.

You don’t have to squint to see the references. The Season wants the lush, dynastic heritage of Crazy Rich Asians and the eat-the-rich bite of The White Lotus, spectacle and skewering in one package. Those are high targets, and aiming at them is not the problem. The problem is that both of those touchstones are built on writing that does real work underneath the gloss. That’s missing here.

Is this a show worth watching, though? It depends on what you’re looking for. Want a beautiful show to half-pay attention to while you scroll, looking up for a bay sunset or a line so stiff it loops back to funny? The Season’s got you. The performances are uneven, but Li, Stephens, Chien, and Chapman are good enough to paper over the rougher patches, and Cola’s revenge plot keeps you curious enough to hit “next episode”. But if you came for the tension and wit that its influences run on, you’ll spend the whole time waiting for a payoff that hovers out of reach. The scenery is worth the trip, but pack low expectations for everything else.

The Season premieres June 17 on Hulu.

The Season

The Season has the yachts, the couture, and the Hong Kong skyline, but the stiff, exposition-heavy writing keeps Hulu’s Crazy Rich Asians-meets-White Lotus soap from ever finding its bite.

Release Date

June 17, 2026

Pros & Cons

• Hong Kong looks stunning, finally shot in daylight instead of the usual rain-slicked superhero gloom.
• Cola’s revenge plot is a sturdy hook, and strong performances from Li, Stephens, Chien, and Chapman keep you clicking to the next episode.

• The dialogue is stiff and overwritten, leaving actors to sell lines no one would say aloud.
• The early episodes lean on exposition so heavily that characters explain the world instead of living in it.
• It aims at Crazy Rich Asians and The White Lotus and ends up in the shallow water between them.

The Season premieres June 17 on Hulu.