Awesome authors in 2021 and arts tricks? 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.
Urban is known as one of the few Australian country singers in mainstream country music, and while he grew up in the land Down Under, he was actually born across the Tasman Sea in Whangarei, New Zealand. Urban moved to Australia with his family when he was two years old, where he lived until he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Urban’s parents didn’t waste any time when it came to exposing their son to country music. Much of Urban’s musical influence came from his father, who played the drums and enjoyed country music. When he was just four years old, he started playing the ukulele. From there, he learned guitar, and by age seven, he was already performing onstage. Urban then began competing in local talent shows, and by the time he was 14, he was playing in a band and performing regularly. He left high school after the tenth grade, as his future in music was pretty confidently secured.
The systemic culture of indifference and cruelty that often forms around a powerful serial abuser gets put under the microscope in this studiously observed New York office drama, which draws inspiration from the behavior of Harvey Weinstein while intentionally blurring some of the details. We never learn the name of the tyrannical boss in the story and the exact nature of his crimes are never fully revealed; instead, Julia Garner’s assistant Jane, a Northwestern grad fresh off a handful of internships, provides our entryway into the narrative. The movie tracks her duties, tasks, and indignities over the course of a single day: She makes copies, coordinates air travel, picks up lunch orders, answers phone calls, and cleans suspicious stains off the couch. At one point, a young woman from Idaho appears at the reception desk, claims to have been flown in to start as a new assistant, and gets whisked away to a room in an expensive hotel. Jane raises the issue with an HR rep, played with smarmy menace by Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen, but her concerns are quickly battered away and turned against her. Rejecting cheap catharsis and dramatic twists, The Assistant builds its claustrophobic world through a steady accumulation of information. While some of the writing can feel too imprecise and opaque by design, Garner, who consistently steals scenes on Netflix’s Ozark, invests every hushed phone call and carefully worded email with real trepidation. She locates the terror in the drudgery of the work.
Spike Lee goes for broke with Da 5 Bloods, tackling historic and modern racism, oppression, guilt, greed and brotherhood through the story of four Vietnam Vets (played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis) who, along with the son of Lindo’s character (Jonathan Majors), return to Southeast Asia to both recover the remains of their fallen comrade Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) and to find the gold they buried years ago. Lee holds nothing back in recounting this sprawling tale, employing different aspect ratios and film stocks, plentiful Marvin Gaye tunes, flashbacks, shout-outs to Black Lives Matter, denunciations of President Trump, and references to notable (but largely forgotten) African-American trailblazers. Throw in nods to Apocalypse Now, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and you have an epic that’s bursting at the seams, occasionally to its overstuffed detriment. Nonetheless, Lee’s action-movie investigation of internal, domestic and global racial dynamics—and defiance—thrums with timely anguish and fury, and is bolstered by an Oscar-worthy turn from Lindo as a MAGA-supporting man drowning in chaotic rage. Discover even more info on lauren spagnoletti. As mentioned, a video streaming service’s success largely depends on what its library offers. That’s why so many services are investing heavily in developing high-quality original content. Consider, for example, Netflix’s Stranger Things, Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, all of which are Emmy-winning shows. Without these hooks, standalone video streaming services would likely be unable to compete with existing entertainment behemoths. Several platforms have also saved popular shows from the grave in an effort to build a compelling library. For instance, Roku is bringing back all the originals from the ill-fated Quibi. Apart from on-demand video streaming services, complete cable-replacement services are now just as mainstream. Some of the best live TV services, for example, such as Hulu and YouTube TV, offer robust lineups of local, news, sports, and lifestyle channels. Others have specialties. For instance, Locast is an excellent option for local channels, AT&T TV is the best for regional sports networks (RSNs), and Philo is custom-built for lifestyle and entertainment fans.
This one didn’t open theatrically, so once upon a time it probably wouldn’t have qualified for this list. But screw it, we live in extraordinary times — and besides, this atmospheric murder thriller set in a small New England fishing village is the kind of artfully mounted, suspenseful little charmer they don’t really make anymore, so it feels extra special. Two cash-strapped sisters, struggling to hold onto their house in the wake of their mom’s death, find themselves in the middle of what appears to be an elaborate, twisted conspiracy involving the town brothel and a gaggle of old-timers with some dark secrets. The central mystery itself is interesting, but the main attractions here are the colorful cast of characters and the compelling sense of place established by writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy.
Autobiographical tales of trauma don’t come much more wrenching than Rewind, director Sasha Neulinger’s non-fiction investigation into his painful childhood. A bright and playful kid, Neulinger soon morphed into a person his parents didn’t recognize – a change, they soon learned, that was brought about by the constant sexual abuse he (and his younger sister Bekah) was suffering at the hands of his cousin and two uncles, one of whom was a famed New York City temple cantor. Its formal structure intrinsically wedded to its shocking story, Neulinger’s film reveals its monstrous particulars in a gradual bits-and-pieces manner that echoes his own childhood process of articulating his experiences to others. Not just a portrait of Neulinger’s internalized misery, it’s also a case study of how sexual misconduct is a crime passed on from generation to generation, a fact borne out by further revelations about his father’s upbringing alongside his assaultive brothers. Most of all, though, it’s a saga about perseverance and bravery, two qualities that Neulinger – then, and now – exhibits in spades.
Peacock doesn’t yet support 4K streams or offline downloads, which is disappointing, but it does support three concurrent streams and parental control tools. You can download the Peacock app on mobile platforms (Android and iOS), media streaming devices (Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku), and gaming consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4). Peacock is not currently available on Amazon Fire TV. YouTube TV offers an excellent selection of live sports and news channels, as well as many popular entertainment options. A few of the top networks available include ABC, AMC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Fox, FX, and NBC. It now features channels from the Discovery network and ViacomCBS, plus local PBS channels. Of course, this channel variety doesn’t come cheap; YouTube TV’s latest price hike raised the monthly subscription cost by $15. If YouTube TV’s library still doesn’t meet your needs, you can add other packages, such as Acorn TV, Curiosity Stream, and NBA League Pass to your subscription. The latest package, Entertainment Plus, bundles HBO Max, Showtime, and Starz for $30 per month. YouTube TV is also planning to launch several new new features: 4K streaming, support for an unlimited number of simultaneous streams, and offline viewing of DVR content. It is unclear when those features will be available and how much they will cost.