Hulu's The Great Is a Must-Watch Historical Comedy — Here's Why You Need to Stream It Now
TL;DR: Stop scrolling past The Great on Hulu. This darkly comic, three-season reimagining of Catherine the Great’s rise to power — starring Emmy nominees Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult — is a sharp, surprising, and complete story that critics loved (Seasons 2 and 3 both hit perfect Rotten Tomatoes scores). It’s all available to binge right now on Hulu in the US, and Disney+ internationally. Go watch it. This weekend.
Why You Need to Watch The Great Right Now (Seriously)
If you've spent the last few years skipping The Great on Hulu, maybe you assumed it was another stiff period drama, all whispered court intrigue and dusty wigs. You weren't alone. But that assumption means you missed three complete seasons of one of the sharpest, funniest, most genuinely surprising television series of the last decade. That’s the real loss here. Not that the show is gone (Hulu cancelled it in August 2023), but that this entire, brilliant run is sitting there, fully bingeable, and a significant chunk of the streaming audience still hasn't touched it. We need to fix this. Fast.
What It's About: An "Occasionally True" Story of Power
The Great is a satirical dark comedy-drama set in 18th-century Russia. It takes massive liberties with history — something the show proudly declares upfront as "an occasionally true story." This isn't a disclaimer; it's the entire point.
Tony McNamara, the Australian screenwriter behind The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), created the series. It ran exclusively on Hulu in the United States, offering a complete narrative arc across its run:
- Season 1 — premiered May 15, 2020 (10 episodes)
- Season 2 — premiered November 19, 2021 (10 episodes)
- Season 3 — premiered May 12, 2023 (8 episodes)
Elle Fanning delivers a career-defining performance as a young Catherine, who will one day become Catherine the Great. She arrives in Russia as an idealistic German noblewoman, full of Enlightenment ideals, convinced she can reform an empire. Honestly, her transformation across the seasons is breathtaking. Then there’s Nicholas Hoult as Emperor Peter III, her erratic, narcissistic, and occasionally charming husband. His performance? Pure genius. The show doesn't just ask you to watch; it pulls you into this absurd, brutal world.
Not Your Average Period Piece: Why The Great Stands Out
Most period dramas, from Bridgerton to The Crown, tend to romanticize history, dressing up power and brutality in gorgeous cinematography. They ask you to admire the furniture, perhaps. The Great does something different. It refuses to romanticize anything. And that refusal — that bracing honesty — is what makes it essential viewing.
What strikes me about McNamara’s writing is how it serves two completely different audiences at once. If you love prestige period dramas, you get the lavish production design, the palace intrigue, the elaborate costuming. And yes, it’s stunning; the visual design alone would justify watching this on the biggest screen you have. But if you've always found the genre a bit too polite, too eager to airbrush history's ugliness into something decorative, The Great offers a far more honest, visceral look at what power actually means when you strip away the sentimentality.
Catherine's journey across three seasons is genuinely Shakespearean in its moral descent. She starts as an eager reformer and ends up making compromises that would have horrified her younger self. The show doesn't let her off the hook for it, either. It reminds me of Breaking Bad and Walter White — that slow, methodical transformation from protagonist to something far more complicated. The only difference? The Great does it with a joke in almost every scene.
Speaking of acclaim, Seasons 2 and 3 both achieved perfect critical scores on Rotten Tomatoes — a rare feat for any series, let alone one in its later years. The show also earned seven Primetime Emmy nominations, with both Fanning and Hoult recognized for their comedy acting.
The Creator's Vision: Power, Not Just History
Tony McNamara has been clear in interviews about his approach to Catherine’s story: fidelity to the historical record wasn't the main goal. The creative philosophy behind The Great is that history itself, as we're usually told it, is a kind of fiction shaped by whoever held the pen. McNamara has described the show as using the past as a "prism" to examine how power is accumulated, how idealism curdles, and how institutions resist change, no matter who’s nominally in charge.
"The show was never really about history," McNamara noted in press materials released through Hulu's official press site, "it's about power and what it does to people." That clarity of intent is visible in every single episode. The jokes aren't there to soften the darkness; they're there to make the darkness visible in a different, often more unsettling, light.
Where to Stream The Great (US, India, & Beyond)
Good news: The entire series is ready to stream right now.
- United States: All three seasons are available on Hulu.
- International Markets: Generally accessible via Disney+ in many regions.
- Digital Purchase: Available on platforms like Fandango at Home.
For viewers in India, the streaming landscape is a bit more complex. The Great isn't currently on Netflix India, Amazon Prime Video India, JioCinema, SonyLIV, or Zee5. Hulu doesn’t operate as a standalone service there. However, Disney+ Hotstar — which often carries Hulu original content in India — is your most likely legal avenue. Availability can shift, though, so always check the platform directly. For the fastest way to verify current Indian availability across all major platforms, Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker is invaluable.
The show's appeal is surprisingly cross-cultural. Catherine as a German outsider navigating a brutal Russian court? That fish-out-of-water dynamic translates cleanly. The comedy of social hierarchies, of characters performing dignity while behaving appallingly, needs no specific cultural context. It’s universal. Plus, the production values absolutely reward a good television set.
Elle Fanning, Nicholas Hoult, and the Ensemble's Brilliance
Tony McNamara isn't a household name yet, but his creative fingerprint is becoming unmistakable. His work with Yorgos Lanthimos — co-writing The Favourite (which won Olivia Colman an Oscar in 2019) and Poor Things (which did the same for Emma Stone in 2024) — cemented him as a singular voice. The Great was his first major TV creation, and it proves his brand of absurdist, historically adjacent dark comedy scales perfectly to a long-form series.
Elle Fanning, who was only 21 when Season 1 premiered, delivers what many critics rightly call her career-defining performance. She has to be funny, terrifying, sympathetic, and morally compromised — sometimes within the same scene — and she handles the tonal demands with effortless precision. What people often miss is how physically demanding the comedy is; Fanning plays genuine emotional beats while surrounded by actors doing something closer to farce, and the balance never, ever slips.
Nicholas Hoult as Peter III is, frankly, one of television's great comic performances of the decade. The supporting cast, including Phoebe Fox, Sacha Dhawan, Adam Godley, and Belinda Bromilow, are all operating at the same heightened, brilliant register. They’re all in on the joke.
You can find the full cast list and Emmy nomination history across all three seasons on Movie OTT's series page.
The End (And Why It Works)
Hulu cancelled The Great in August 2023, about three months after Season 3 finished airing. The decision was reportedly a cost-related call, not a creative one — the show was expensive, and the streaming landscape had tightened.
Hard to say if a revival is coming. McNamara hasn't ruled anything out publicly, but there's been no concrete movement on a continuation. What the cancellation did, somewhat accidentally, is leave viewers with a complete story. Season 3 functions as a genuine conclusion — Catherine's arc resolves in a way that feels earned rather than truncated.
For the latest streaming availability updates across the US, UK, India, and Spain, Movie OTT has the current picture. If The Great finally appears on a platform accessible to you — watch it. All of it. This weekend if possible.
