A burning yacht is a wonderfully unsubtle way to promise that the rich people will eventually get what is coming to them. That image gives The Season its hook before the series rewinds six weeks to the start of Hong Kong’s summer boating calendar, where business meetings wear cocktail dresses and every social invitation sounds like a court summons with better champagne.
Created by Yalun Tu, this six-episode Hulu drama follows Cola Pierce, played by Jessie Mei Li, an American economics student who arrives in Hong Kong for a job with Carrie Shen, a wealth manager with access to the city’s most powerful families. Carrie brings Cola into the orbit of Fiona and Christopher Hext, a married power couple whose yacht parties, galas, charity spectacles, and dinner-table ambushes run the season like a floating monarchy.
Cola looks like the audience surrogate at first: observant, eager, slightly out of depth. Then she starts snooping through the Hexts’ stateroom, lifting family photographs, inventing a lost-earrings crisis, and visiting her imprisoned father. Suddenly, the wide-eyed newcomer act has a fuse attached.
The Revenge Plot Keeps the Champagne Moving
The show’s best structural choice is its compactness. Six episodes, each around the length of a long lunch with people you should never lend money to, gives The Season enough room for affairs, blackmail, business deals, reputation management, and family secrets without letting any subplot squat in the guest room.
Cola’s revenge agenda gives the series a clean engine. Her first big social test comes during the Hext yacht party, when she claims to have lost jade earrings given to her by her father. The search becomes a little party game, which is exactly the sort of thing bored elites invent when empathy would require too much paperwork. It also lets Cola measure everyone around her: who helps, who performs concern, who sees her as an inconvenience in borrowed shoes.
The supporting players enter in familiar formation. Andrew Fung is the loud playboy with business ambitions and no inside voice. Madeline Wong is the widow carrying scandal into every room Fiona would rather keep spotless. David Ho, recently divorced and labeled Hong Kong’s most eligible bachelor, is written as the rare decent man in a world where decency may turn out to be a marketing strategy.
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The opening flash-forward to Cola floating near a burning yacht gives each party and seaside meal a useful tick of suspense. The series never makes you forget that something will explode. The trick is that the small explosions, the dirty looks, the withheld invitations, the wrong sentence at lunch, are often the better ones.
Hong Kong Does the Heavy Lifting
The sharpest performance here belongs to the location scouts. The Season gives Hong Kong the kind of screen presence American television too rarely grants it: sun on the harbor, towers pressed against green mountains, polished apartments, racetracks, noodle shops, yacht decks, beachside seafood markets, and Lamma Island tanks full of live abalone during Cola’s early business test.
That specificity matters because the dialogue keeps trying to flatten everything into exposition. When the show lets characters move through the city, switching between English and Cantonese, doing business in leisure spaces and leisure in business spaces, the world starts to breathe. When Christopher casually acknowledges fortunes built on opium and subjugation, the Hexts’ grandeur gains a sharper edge. Their money has a past, and the show knows it.
It does less with that knowledge than it could. The elite world rests on colonial inheritance, class exclusion, imported labor, and social gatekeeping, but the series mostly uses those pressures as seasoning for a frothy revenge soap.
Still, the setting gives even the weaker scenes a pulse. A charity boxing event called “White Collar Knockout” may sound like a LinkedIn post in eveningwear, but the city around it keeps the show from feeling generic. Some series build worlds through writing. This one often survives by pointing the camera in the right direction.
Pretty Views, Stiff Lines
The biggest problem is that too many characters speak like they are reading their own press bios at a fundraiser. Early scenes carry a heavy burden of introduction: who matters, who is sleeping with whom, who was banished, who must impress Fiona, why the season matters, why one wrong move can kill a career. The actors push through it gamely, but the pilot often sounds less like a party than a shareholder briefing with canapés.
Benign nonsense would be easier to forgive if the lines had more snap. A show about rich people behaving badly needs verbal knives. Here, the insults are often butter knives, and sometimes plastic ones. The event names do not help. “1920s Shanghai Gala” and “White Collar Knockout” feel less like society traditions than calendar placeholders nobody remembered to replace.
The cast finds life where it can. Mei Li gives Cola a smart double rhythm, letting the newcomer mask slip just enough to suggest calculation behind the smile. Celina Jade makes Carrie most interesting in quiet beats, especially when her polished mentor act thins out into loneliness.
Justin Chien gives David a soft, bruised warmth, and his tentative romance with Carrie supplies the show’s most charming emotional thread. Their shy smiles and deliberately cheesy first date have a rom-com pulse the rest of the series could use.
Yvonne Chapman brings welcome bite to Madeline, especially when she is forced through the social meat grinder of Fiona’s circle. Toby Stephens and Karena Lam have the posture of old money royalty, but Christopher and Fiona often remain types: the empire man and the gatekeeper wife, both trapped inside dialogue that keeps labeling them.
The Season works best as a breezy summer soap with a revenge fuse, gorgeous scenery, and enough rich-people nonsense to keep the next episode button warm. Just don’t ask the dialogue to steer the yacht.
The premium drama series premiered today, June 17, 2026, launching all six episodes simultaneously. Audiences can stream the show exclusively on Hulu in the United States, Now TV in Hong Kong, and across regional markets via Viu. The plot follows a tight-knit group of affluent friends whose glamorous summer gathering in Hong Kong quickly unravels into a dangerous web of deception and shifting alliances following the arrival of a mysterious newcomer.
Where to Watch The Season Online
Full Credits
Title: The Season
Distributor: Hulu, Now TV, Viu
Release date: June 17, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 60 minutes
Director: Marialy Rivas
Writers: Yalun Tu, Marialy Rivas
Producers and Executive Producers: Chloe Dan, Matt Aragachi, Dylan Tarason, Janice Lee, Agatha Lo, Yalun Tu, Marialy Rivas, Aaron Shershow
Cast: Jessie Mei Li, Toby Stephens, Karena Lam, Chris Pang, Celina Jade, Justin Chien, Yvonne Chapman, Kōki, Claire Lovering, Jai Day, Lincoln Younes, Lee Jae-yoon, Reina Sawai, Xyza Cada, Carl Ng
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Sergio Delgado
Editors: Sandy Pereira, Christopher A. Smith
Composer: Lesley Barber
The Review
The Season
The Season is best treated as a sunlit soap with a revenge fuse and a dialogue problem. Its Hong Kong setting gives the drama texture, Cola’s hidden agenda keeps the plot moving, and Carrie and David’s romance supplies the only real ache. The rich-people scheming is glossy, familiar, and easy to binge, provided you can forgive lines that arrive wearing name tags. A yacht burns, secrets spill, and the scenery wins the season.
PROS
- Strong Hong Kong setting
- Brisk six-episode pace
- Cola’s revenge hook
- Carrie and David’s chemistry
- Yvonne Chapman’s lively Madeline
CONS
- Stiff dialogue
- Thin elite characters
- Familiar soap plotting
- Weak social bite
- Clunky event names
