Fan Favorites from Streaming Services
BY Shannon Entin
Published 5 years ago
Remember when everyone talked about their favorite shows on NBC, CBS, and ABC? Well, the times, they are a-changin’ and now everyone seems to buzz about their favorite shows on their favorite streaming network. We asked our community to share their fan favorites on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO, and we’ll be sharing those with you today.
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4:05 What we’re watching: The Rain, The Silence, Murder Mystery, Left Behind, Siren, Toy Story 4, Dark Phoenix, Mad Men, Handmaid’s Tale, Killing Eve, Jane the Virgin, Pose, Jessica Jones.
Stinger Topic of the Week: Fan Favorites on Streaming Networks
25:30 We polled our Stinger Community to find the best original shows on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, and HBO. If you’d like to know what people think are some of the best shows streaming right now, we’re giving you an overview – and our personal thoughts – on all these shows, because we’ve watched them all!
Fan Favorites on Netflix
Stranger Things: 60 mins. Two Seasons, 8 & 9 episodes. Season 3 comes out July 4th with 8 episodes. Stranger Things takes place in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana in the early-mid 1980s. The first season revolves around the disappearance of a boy named Will Byers. While trying to find Will, the town uncovers a mystery involving secret experiments, supernatural forces and a strange girl named “Eleven” with telekinetic powers. The second season dives deeper into Eleven’s back story and the evil force trying to take over the town of Hawkins. The upcoming third season will be focusing on “forces of evil that are new.” It’s supposed to be the darkest season yet!
Grace & Frankie: 30 mins. 5 Seasons (renewed), 13 episodes each. Grace and Frankie are two unlikely friends who are brought together after their husbands announce that they are in love with each other and plan to get married.
Orange is the New Black: 60 mins. 7 Seasons (completed), 13 episodes each. Piper Chapman is a public relations executive in her mid-30s who is sentenced to spend time in a minimum-security women’s prison for her association with a drug runner 10 years earlier. Forced to trade power suits for prison orange, Chapman makes her way through the corrections system and adjusts to life behind bars, making friends with the many eccentric, unusual and unexpected people she meets. (And there’s lots of sex.)
House of Cards: 60 mins. 6 Seasons (completed), 13 episodes each. Majority House Whip Frank Underwood takes you on a journey as he exacts his vengeance on those he feels wronged him – that is, his own cabinet members and the President of the United States himself. Dashing, cunning, methodical and vicious, Frank and his wife, Claire, take Washington by storm, climbing the hierarchical ladder to power.
Dead to Me: 30 mins. 1 Season (renewed for S2), 10 episodes. Dead to Me is about a strong friendship that develops between Jen, a tightly wound widow, and Judy, a free spirit with a shocking secret.
Daredevil: 50 mins. 3 Seasons (completed), 13 episodes each. The first season sees lawyer-by-day Matt Murdock use his heightened senses from being blinded as a young boy to fight crime at night on the streets of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood as Daredevil, while uncovering a conspiracy of the criminal underworld led by Wilson Fisk. Eventually, he must decide between hiding from the world as a criminal lawyer, or embracing his life as a hero vigilante.
Black Mirror: 5 Seasons, number of episodes and length vary. A British science fiction anthology television series created by Charlie Brooker mainly focusing on humanity’s relationship to technology and its consequences. (Check out our Black Mirror Friday podcast!)
Russian Doll: 30 mins. 1 Season (renewed), 8 episodes. Russian Doll follows a woman named Nadia on her journey as the guest of honor at a seemingly inescapable birthday party one night in New York City. She dies repeatedly, always restarting at the same moment at the party. She tries to figure out what is happening to her.
Fan Favorites on Hulu
The Handmaid’s Tale: 60 mins. 3 Seasons, 10-13 episodes each. Based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood, this series is set in Gilead, a totalitarian society in what used to be part of the United States. Gilead is ruled by a fundamentalist Christian regime that treats women as property of the state, and is faced with environmental disasters and a plummeting birth rate. In a desperate attempt to repopulate a devastated world, the few remaining fertile women are forced into sexual servitude. One of these women, Offred, is determined to survive the terrifying world she lives in, and find the daughter that was taken from her.
Castle Rock: 60 mins. 1 Season (renewed), 10 episodes. Castle Rock combines the mythological scale and intimate character storytelling of Stephen King’s best-loved works, weaving an epic saga of darkness and light, played out on a few square miles of Maine woodland.
Marvel’s Runaways: 60 mins. 2 Seasons (renewed), 10-13 episodes each. Six teenagers from different backgrounds, and each with special powers, unite against a common enemy – their criminal parents, collectively known as Pride. In the second season, the teenagers are now on the run from their parents, living on their own and figuring out how to stop Pride.
Fan Favorites on Amazon Prime Video
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: 60 mins. 2 Seasons (renewed for 3rd), 8-10 episodes each. Set in 1958, Miriam Maisel (aka Midge) is a young, upper middle-class Jewish housewife living in Manhattan. Her husband of four years, Joel, a businessman working at a plastics company, moonlights as a comedian at The Gaslight Cafe, using other comics’ material. After one particularly mediocre performance, Joel leaves Midge for his secretary. Midge drunkenly goes back to The Gaslight where she delivers an impromptu set, confessing her predicament to the audience. Her bawdy, biting, and brilliant delivery enthralls the audience, prompting Midge to pursue her own career in comedy.
Jack Ryan: 60 mins. 1 Season (renewed for two more), 8 episodes. Former Marine, now CIA financial analyst, Jack Ryan is wrenched from the security of his desk job into the field after discovering a string of dubious bank transfers, which are being carried out by a rising Islamic terrorist named Suleiman. The upcoming second season has been described as following Ryan as he confronts “the forces in power in a dangerous, declining democratic regime in South America.”
The Tick: 60 mins. 2 Seasons (completed), 12 & 10 episodes. The Tick is an invulnerable superhero in a blue tick suit who arrives in the city to help combat crime and uncover the mysterious figure behind the city’s underworld. He befriends a nervous and mild-mannered young man named Arthur who becomes his sidekick. They come to realize that an apparently long-dead supervillain called “The Terror” may still be pulling the strings in the city’s underworld.
Man in the High Castle: 60 mins. 3 Seasons (renewed for 4th which will be the last), 10 episodes each. In this dystopian series, the Axis powers won World War II, leading to the United States being divided into three parts, an area controlled by the Japanese, a Nazi-controlled section, and a buffer zone between the two. Despite the oppression, a new hope emerges when films turn up that seem to show a different world. A woman believes the films contain the key to freedom and is determined to find their mysterious guardian.
The Expanse: 60 mins. 3 Seasons, 10-13 episodes, ran on SyFy which then canceled it; picked up by Amazon for 4th season (release TBD). The series is set in a future where humanity has colonized the Solar System and follows a disparate band of antiheroes as they unwittingly unravel a conspiracy which threatens the system’s fragile state of Cold War-like peace, the class balance, and the survival of humanity.
Fan Favorites on HBO
Big Little Lies: 60 mins, 2 Seasons, 10 episodes each. Based on the best-selling book by Liane Moriarty, this series weaves a darkly comedic tale of murder and mischief in the tranquil beachfront town of Monterey, Calif. Amidst doting moms, successful husbands, beautiful children, and stunning homes exists a community fueled by rumors and fractured relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and friends and neighbors.
Game of Thrones: 60-90 mins. 8 Seasons (completed), 6-10 episodes each. Game of Thrones is roughly based on the story lines of A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin. Set in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, the series chronicles the violent struggle for the Iron Throne among the realm’s noble families, while other families fight for independence from it.
Westworld: 60 mins. 2 Seasons (renewed for 3rd), 10 episodes each. Westworld isn’t your typical amusement park. Intended for rich vacationers, the futuristic park — which is looked after by robotic “hosts” — allows its visitors to live out their fantasies through artificial consciousness. No matter how illicit the fantasy may be, there are no consequences for the park’s guests, allowing for any wish to be indulged.
And finally, Shannon and Fadra share what show we would choose if we could only watch one show for the rest of our life. Can you guess our choices?
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