Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Friday, August 6th, 2021

It's a whole lot of Hulu...

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Friday, August 6th, 2021. I'm writing this from the Twin Cities suburbs, where AllYourScreens HQ is powered by coffee and a soup/salad combo from Panera.

NEWS FROM HULU
Today is Hulu's day to present their programming to the Television Critics Association (TCA). Here are some highlights from the presentation:

* Season two of The Animaniacs will premiere on November 5th.

* The new series Dopesick will premiere on October 13th.  The series "takes viewers to the epicenter of America’s struggle with opioid addiction, from the boardrooms of Big Pharma to a distressed Virginia mining community to the hallways of the DEA." It stars Michael Keaton, Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg, Will Poulter, John Hoogenakker, Kaitlyn Dever and Rosario Dawson.

* Season two of The Great will premiere on November 19th.

* Hulu gave a series order to the original comedy series This Fool, inspired by the life of up-and-coming comedian Chris Estrada, in which he will also write, star and executive produce.

* Hulu has ordered two true-crime programs: the documentary Dead Asleep from award-winning director Skye Borgman and Captive Audience, a docuseries which explores the evolution of true-crime storytelling through the lens of one family’s journey.

* Padma Lakshmi will be back with a new season of Taste The Nation. This seasons is a four-episode season described as a "Holiday Edition," and it premieres November 4th. 

* Hosted by Tamera Mowry-Housley and former White House pastry chef Bill Yosses, Baker's Dozen will pit passionate amateur bakers against seasoned professionals to determine who will win the golden rolling pin and take home the cash prize. The show premieres Thursday, October 7th.

* Chef David Chang and Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville team up on The Next Thing You Eat, a six-episode docuseries that premieres Thursday, October 21st. The series "explores the seismic changes happening all around us and what they mean for the way we’ll eat in the future. Chang and a diverse cast of characters dive headfirst into what lies ahead, including everything from robots, to lab-grown fish, to insect farms, to artificial intelligence calling all the shots."

FACTOID OF THE DAY
Hulu announced some kinda vague-ish data about the performance of season four of The Handmaid's Tale:

• The Handmaid’s Tale was the most watched series on Hulu every week throughout season four which launched in April. (including Originals and non-Originals)

• The Handmaid’s Tale season four finale, which debuted on Wednesday, June 16, was the most watched episode of any series on Hulu on premiere day.

• The Handmaid’s Tale has grown in viewership season over season, every season, with season three to season four viewership up 32%.

SPEAKING OF HULU'S UX AND HULU ORIGINALS
As you probably have gathered, I am a bit obsessed with UX questions. Especially with streamers, because a good user interface can go a long way towards helping with content discovery and ultimately bigger issues such as churn. And my obsession with UX issues has resulted in me hearing from product managers and engineers at the various streamers, who will talk to me off-the-record or on background about some of the questions I've raised in this newsletter. 

And maybe it's because UX decisions are so tied to marketing and sales decisions, but it is incredibly difficult to get people to talk on the record about UX stuff. Which is too bad, because I believe that an effective UX is a core part of any successful streaming service.

Since this is turning into a Hulu-centric newsletter today, let me highlight a Hulu UX question that really stumps me. I haven't had much luck getting someone at Hulu to speak with me on the record. I know there a bunch of people at Hulu subscribed to the newsletter, so if any of you can help with this, please reach out.

Hulu spent it's time at today's TCA's promoting their upcoming original content and it's a move that makes sense. They have some excellent stuff coming later in the year and much of it is more mainstream than some of their previous efforts. So the more promotion these shows can get - both inside and outside the app - the better.

But Hulu's UX is often...awkward. I have a live Hulu TV subscription that I most often access on a Roku device. So these observations are based on that, although having looked at the web and mobile UX's, they are pretty similar.

For instance, the main home page on Hulu is a very long series of horizontal content rows. It resembles the Netflix main page, with the biggest differentiation being that Hulu's content rows come in at least two different heights. 

The problem for me is just the sheer number of horizontal rows. As well as the fact that Hulu originals are buried in the middle of everything. I am assuming that the order is somewhat dynamic based on the user profile, but based on what I've seen on the profiles on my account (which include a 16-year-old anime fan & a 70-ish mother-in-law who loves procedurals), the order isn't radically different.

And this is the current content list on my profile. Which is just overwhelming and I am someone who makes his living watching television:

Top Promo Window
Keep Watching
Tokyo 2020
Olympic Picks
Live Now
TV For You
Movies For You
Bingeable TV
Premium Add-On Promotion (In this case, Showtime)
Hulu Picks
New Shows (which appears to be new episodes of programs you already watch)
Sports For You
News For You
Live TV Favorites
Hulu Originals
Action Movies
FX On Hulu
Premium Add-Ons
Action Dramas
Award-Winning TV Dramas
Hulu Originals For Kids (most of which is YA titles)
Blockbuster Movies
Newly Added Movies
Game Shows
Newly Added TV
Mystery Thrillers
Complete Series
Comic Book Heroes & Villains
Anthology TV Series
Home & Cooking
Academy Award Nominated Films
Science TV
Kids Movies
Adventure Movies
Full Series Dramas
Martial Arts Movies
Sci-Fi Movies
Action Adventure Movies
Reality TV 
Funny Food Shows
TV About Siblings
KIds
Genres

I would love to know the reasoning behind this. I am assuming that at least some of it is driven by user interaction, but from the outside, this seems like a list that could be reduced by a third without much of an impact. My default method for finding something is by using the search function, which really shouldn't be the first thing people try. That limits the ability of a service to surface new content that might be slightly out of the user's comfort level or knowledge base.

But I am sympathetic to the difficulties that come from designing an interface that is supposed to serve both the needs of the users as well as the content providers, marketing and sales teams and original content projects. And even when you make a UX decision that seems to make things better, problems can come up that are unexpected. For instance, in the Roku Hulu app, there was a slight tweak made to the "My stuff" section. This is where all of the content is listed which you have recorded and until the update every episode was listed individually, in chronological order. One advantage of that is that since the basic Hulu Live TV package has a limit of 50 DVR hours spread across all of the profiles, it was easy to go in watch or delete the oldest episodes to stay under the limit. Because otherwise Hulu will delete the oldest content to make room for new recordings.

But a tweak was made that took every episode of a show and put them together in one folder. You then have to click into each show folder to see what episodes are inside. Which makes it almost impossible to see which episodes are older and do some triage before things are deleted. I know, it's a minor complaint. But the change also made my Hulu experience more clunky and added more steps to playing recorded titles. Not so much that it would provoke me to drop the service, but annoying nonetheless. FWIW, after I complained about it on Twitter, someone from Hulu reached out to let me know that if I was unhappy with the change, I could use the web version. Which seems like a non-optimal solution, but as I said, I am sympathetic to the challenges of trying to please multiple stakeholders and audiences.

SEE YOU MONDAY
I think this is the first time a newsletter has ended up focusing on one streaming service. And as I write this, a Hulu panel just ended that included Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez and it was just as funny as you might imagine. Back to a more normal newsletter next week. The three-day PBS sessions will be taking place, but those won't be dominating the newsletter in the same way.

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.