‘The Season’ Review: Hulu’s Hong Kong-Set Wealth Drama

There comes a moment in the dog days of summer when all you want is to kick back with a fizzy drink and an excuse to neither think too hard nor feel too deeply. These are not the times for high-minded prestige series that require active viewing to appreciate every nuance, nor for thrillers and comedies exciting enough to quicken the pulse.

These are the moments for shows just breezy enough to borrow your attention without quite holding it — for shows, in other words, like Hulu’s The Season. A little bit twisty, a little bit funny and ultimately so frothy it’ll disappear from memory faster than bubbles from a champagne coupe, this Hong Kong-set English-language Hulu drama may not be your next obsession. But under the right circumstances, it could be an ideal distraction.

Unfolding over a summer foretold, by the in media res opening, to culminate in a fiery shipwreck, The Season is Hulu’s latest offering to the apparently inexhaustible appetite of viewers for soaps about outrageously wealthy people who spend their time near Instagram-worthy bodies of water. At first, its most obvious comparison might seem to be Crazy Rich Asians; promotional materials will remind you it hails from the same studio (SK Global, who produced alongside PCCW Media).

In actuality, its premise falls closer to Apple’s Palm Royale or the 2010s ABC drama Revenge, following a mysterious outsider trying to gain a foothold among the elite. In this case, the interloper is Cola (Jessie Mei Lin, Shadow and Bone), an American freshly arrived for an internship with Carrie (Celina Jade), wealth manager to Hong Kong’s most prestigious families — including Fiona (Karena Lam) and Christopher Hext (Toby Stephens), a clan so old-money their ancestors are said to have “practically invented colonialism.”

Ostensibly, they and all their closest friends and frenemies have gathered at the Hexts’ yacht in episode one to celebrate the start of boating season, a six-week stretch spent hopping from charity events to galas to over-the-top dinner parties. Really, everyone’s arrived with their own explosive secrets and ulterior motives — whether it’s party boy Andrew (Crazy Rich Asians’ Chris Pang) hoping to burnish his career with a major business deal, or black sheep Madeline (an appealing Yvonne Chapman) trying to salvage her reputation, or whatever it is Cola’s up to when she thinks no one’s watching.

Pretty much everything The Season does has been done before, and better. The family dramas and professional scheming can’t hold a candle to Succession. The gradually emergent upstairs-downstairs theme was explored with more sophistication on The White Lotus. The petty put-downs were sharper on Palm Royale. The wealth porn was more convincingly luxe on Crazy Rich Asians (for a show about people who live to flaunt their cash, the sets and costumes often look surprisingly chintzy), while the half-hearted efforts to take the villainous upper crust to task was executed with much sharper conviction on Industry.

What The Season does do well is execute each one of these elements with just enough finesse to be more amusing than annoying, and then weave them all together into a single, briskly paced story. Li’s enjoyably dynamic heroine, constantly planning three steps ahead to charm her way into a crucial meeting with Christopher or shake off a ruthless fixer (Lee Jae-yoon), ensures there’s always another big plot turn coming around the bend. Meanwhile, the compact running time — six episodes averaging 48 minutes per — ensures each one pays off before it stretches out too long or grows too tangled.

Granted, none of them linger long enough to make a lasting impact, either. The only thread to really pull me in was the romantic subplot between Carrie and lonely lawyer David (Justin Chien), played out over shy smiles and missed connections and then a first date that’s all the more endearing for being purposely cheesy. It’s as emotionally effective as this show gets, and creator Yalun Tu should seriously consider making her next project a rom-com. (Chien, here as in The Brothers Sun putting his soulful puppy-dog eyes to good use, can come along for the ride too.)

Otherwise, while I was always at least a little bit curious to see how Madeline might navigate the viper’s nest of a country club social committee meeting or what personal “condition” Fiona might be concealing from her family, I was rarely very invested in finding out the answers. The Season’s characters, entertaining in their obnoxiously wealthy and drama-prone ways but not exactly dimensional, simply aren’t built for close scrutiny. But I also found that with a show this relaxingly breezy, I didn’t much care that I didn’t much care.

“Every day is a day off from business,” declares Christopher right before entering the first of Fiona’s many no-work-allowed parties. This will turn out to be a barely disguised lie; to the contrary, he’s going to spend this bash and every other wheeling and dealing and schmoozing his butt off under the guise of socializing, while everyone around him does the same. It’s a tempting illusion nevertheless. Maybe this series can’t offer its characters a real vacation, much less the rest of us. But if you’re willing to let yourself indulge in the fantasy of a life so charmed that even work looks like leisure, The Season is more than happy to wash right over you.