GoldSea Streamers Guide to HULU
By J. J. Ghosh | 20 Apr, 2026

Part 1 of our series on how Asians fare on America's top streaming platforms.

Let’s start with the obvious: Representation matters.

Not in the corporate-diversity “change your profile picture to a flag” kind of way.

In the specific, material way that determines whether a 12-year-old girl turns on a TV and sees someone who looks like her navigating something that resembles her life.  Or whether she spends another decade watching white protagonists and concluding, at some subconscious level, that her stories aren’t worth telling.

Deli Boys is about two Pakistani American brothers who inherit their father’s criminal empire

Hollywood has been slow to reckon with this.  Before Fresh off the Boat and Master of None premiered in the mid-2010s, there hadn’t been an Asian American-led series since Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl in 1994 — a gap of more than twenty years.  Twenty years in which the AAPI community grew, diversified, produced artists and writers and directors, and watched the industry look right through them.

Streaming changed some of that.  Not enough, but some.  And with more AAPI content being produced now than at any other point in American television history, it seems like a good time to take stock of where each major platform actually stands — what they’re doing right, what they could do a little better, and whether the progress is as real as the press releases suggest.

This is the first in an ongoing series doing exactly that.  We’re starting with Hulu.

Hulu is of course a mainstream service with a broad library that sits inside the Disney ecosystem — which means it benefits from the resources of one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, and has no excuse for a thin bench.

It also has a dedicated AAPI content hub, which means that people over there are paying attention.

Fire Island reimagines Pride and Prejudice as a gay buddy comedy

The Top 20 AAPI Titles on Hulu Right Now

Before we get into the analysis, here are our top 20 favorite pieces of AAPI content currently available on the platform:

Series:

● Shōgun (2024) — The Emmy-sweeping FX epic set in feudal Japan, with a nearly all-Japanese cast delivering career-best performances.

● Interior Chinatown (2024) — Charles Yu’s meta-fiction about a Chinese American background actor trapped in a cop show.  Inventive, sharp, and unlike anything else on TV.

● Deli Boys (2025) — A Hulu original about Pakistani American brothers inheriting their father’s criminal empire.  The breakout AAPI comedy of the moment.

● PEN15 (2019) — Maya Erskine’s cringey, brilliant middle school comedy.  One of the most honest portrayals of growing up mixed Asian American in recent memory.

● The Mindy Project (2012) — Mindy Kaling’s groundbreaking sitcom and one of the first Indian American-led comedies in broadcast history.

● Fresh off the Boat (2015) — The first Asian American family sitcom on network TV in over twenty years when it debuted.  Historically significant and still funny.

● The Cleaning Lady (2022) — A Cambodian American doctor navigating organized crime in America.  Elodie Yung is excellent.

● Killing Eve (2018) — Sandra Oh’s tour de force.  The show is British but Oh’s performance is the whole thing.

● How To Die Alone (2024) — Natasha Rothwell’s Hulu original features a South Asian love story at its center.

● Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi (2020) — Padma Lakshmi travels America exploring immigrant food culture.  Warm, political, and underrated.

● Reservation Dogs (2021) — Co-created by Taika Waititi, featuring an almost entirely Indigenous cast and creative team.

● Gannibal (2022) — A slow-burn Japanese horror series about a cop in a remote village with a dark secret.  Genuinely unsettling.

● Light Shop (2024) — A recent Korean mystery series generating strong word of mouth.

● Attack on Titan (2013) — The most acclaimed anime series on the platform, now complete.

Movies:

● Quiz Lady (2023) — Awkwafina and Sandra Oh as squabbling sisters.  A Hulu original that delivers exactly what it promises.

● Fire Island (2022) — Joel Kim Booster’s Pride & Prejudice reimagining set among a group of gay Asian American friends.  Funny, romantic, and culturally specific.

● Decision to Leave (2022) — Park Chan-wook’s gorgeous Korean noir.  One of the best films of the decade.

● A Nice Indian Boy (2024) — A quiet, sweet romantic comedy about a gay Indian American man bringing home his white boyfriend.

● Minding the Gap (2018) — Bing Liu’s Oscar-nominated documentary about three young men in Rockford, Illinois.  One of the best American documentaries of the last decade.

● Crush (2022) — A queer teen romance with an Asian American lead.  Light but charming.

The State of Play

AAPI representation in streaming nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021, rising from 6.1% to 11% of talent across the top 1,500 shows, according to Nielsen — and streaming led broadcast and cable by a significant margin.  That’s real progress, regardless of how low the baseline was.

By 2022, AANHPI representation had settled back to around 5% of screen time across all platforms.  Two-thirds of Asian Americans still feel there is not enough representation on TV, and over half feel that TV’s portrayal of AAPI is inaccurate.  Progress, in other words, has been real but uneven — a spike followed by a plateau, rather than a sustained upward curve.

Hulu’s current AAPI library reflects that story.  There are genuine highlights.  There are also some gaps.

Top Content

The crown jewel is Shōgun, the FX series that premiered in 2024 and swept the Emmys with a nearly all-Japanese cast delivering performances that would have been unthinkable on American network television a decade ago.  It is, without question, one of the best things available on any streaming platform right now, and the fact that it lives on Hulu is a genuine asset.

Interior Chinatown, also from 2024, is the other standout — Charles Yu’s meta-fictional adaptation about a Chinese American actor trapped as a background character in a cop show, trying to become the protagonist of his own story.  It’s formally inventive, genuinely funny, and one of the sharpest pieces of writing about Asian American identity and the entertainment industry in years.

Deli Boys, a 2025 Hulu original about Pakistani American brothers inheriting their father’s criminal empire, is the most recent addition to the list and the most exciting: a comedy about South Asian Americans that doesn’t treat them as exotic, doesn’t center their immigrant experience as the primary conflict, and gives them the full genre treatment that Italian and Irish American stories have gotten for decades.  Season 2 is also on its way.  Props to Hulu for renewing it and giving it a real sustained chance.

The older titles hold up too.  PEN15 remains one of the most honest portrayals of growing up mixed-race Asian American that’s ever been made.  Fresh off the Boat was a landmark when it aired — the first Asian American family sitcom on network TV in over twenty years — and still holds up.  The Mindy Project gave Mindy Kaling the platform to create one of the first Indian American-led comedies in broadcast history.  These aren’t minor achievements.  They are part of a real lineage.

Room for Improvement

Here’s the honest assessment: Hulu’s AAPI content hub, despite its best titles, relies too heavily on its anime library to pad the numbers.

Anime is Japanese animation consumed primarily by non-Japanese audiences in an American context.  Attack on Titan, Naruto, One-Punch Man, and Demon Slayer are all excellent shows.  They are not AAPI representation in the way that Interior Chinatown is AAPI representation.  Counting them as equivalent is the streaming equivalent of a restaurant putting edamame on the menu and calling it diversity.

Within the AAPI category itself, the representation is also uneven: East Asian representation leads by a wide margin, South Asian representation is roughly half that, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander representation is barely visible at 0.6% of screen time across platforms.  Hulu’s library reflects this imbalance.  The South Asian content is thin outside of The Mindy Project and Deli Boys.  Pacific Islander stories are essentially absent.  Filipino American stories — despite Filipinos being one of the largest Asian American subgroups in the country — are nowhere to be found in any prominent way.

There is also a documentary gap.  Minding the Gap is one of the best documentaries on the platform, period.  But a single entry does not constitute a commitment to telling AAPI stories in non-fiction form, where some of the most urgent and underreported stories live right now: the detention of Chinese American researchers, the targeting of South Asian communities, the political coming-of-age of a generation of AAPI voters.

The Verdict

Hulu gets a B+.  The top of the library is genuinely excellent — Shōgun and Interior Chinatown alone would justify a subscription for any AAPI viewer — and the original content slate, particularly Deli Boys, suggests the platform is investing in new voices rather than just curating existing ones.

But the depth isn’t there yet.  Too much of the hub is anime, too little of it is Pacific Islander or South Asian, and the documentary shelf is nearly bare.  For a platform with Disney’s resources and a dedicated AAPI content category, the gap between what exists and what’s possible still has room to narrow.

I realize that I might sound overly critical.  Twenty years ago, this catalog would have merited the highest marks imaginable.  That we can hold Hulu — and every streaming service — to such a high standard in 2026 is frankly an exciting sign of progress.

The question is whether that commitment holds, or whether the current moment of visibility fades the way it has before.

Next up: Apple TV.