With its 2013 premiere, House of Cards is largely considered the first major made-for-streaming TV series. The show had a notable impact and was followed by other streaming heavy-hitters like Orange is the New Black (2013), Bosch (2015), and Stranger Things (2016). Yet until 2017, no streaming series had ever won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series. That is, until The Handmaid’s Tale.
With only a handful of drama series under its belt, Hulu took a chance on an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Beyond its prestigious source material, The Handmaid’s Tale made its aspiration for quality abundantly clear with the casting of prestige TV darling Elisabeth Moss, who had risen to fame with The West Wing and Mad Men.
The Handmaid’s Tale instantly made history. At the 2017 Emmys, its first season became the first streaming show to win the award for Outstanding Drama Series, and the first Hulu-produced original series to win any major award. It was far from being the first-ever streaming show, but The Handmaid’s Tale ensured that the up-and-coming medium was never perceived the same way again.
Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale Set New Expectations For TV Shows On Streaming
In many ways, the streaming revolution was at first akin to the birth of cable in the ’90s and 2000s. With their private, commercial-free, paid subscription business model, cable networks like HBO and Showtime were free from many of the restrictions of network television, a privilege their shows liberally availed themselves of.
HBO’s Oz, the cabler’s first one-hour drama, was, first and foremost, shockingly gratuitous in its language, violence, and sexual content. It wasn’t until the premiere of The Sopranos two years later that HBO became synonymous with quality, cementing the idea that mature and quality content could go hand in hand.
Notably, The Sopranos would go on to earn HBO, and cable TV as a whole, its first Outstanding Drama Series Emmy.
Years later, the new frontier of streaming enjoyed many of these same freedoms and made a point to take advantage of them. Orange is the New Black was Netflix’s second-ever globally released streaming series and was, like Oz, set in a prison. Also like Oz, Orange generated buzz for its unabashedly frank and graphic depiction of prison life that highlighted stories seldom told on TV.
Shows like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards piqued viewers’ interest in this new wave of television, but it was The Handmaid’s Tale and its historic win that had The Sopranos effect on streaming, elevating the medium to one that could be held to the same, if not higher, standard of quality as traditional television.
Streaming Titles Are Now Common For Major Award Categories
Image via Hulu
In the years since, streaming has truly blossomed not only in scope and popularity but in quality. In 2024, Hulu again made Emmys history through its partnership with FX. The FX on Hulu original series Shōgun won 18 awards at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards, to this day the most of any series in a single year.
These shows weren’t flukes. Especially after HBO’s (convoluted) shift to its streaming service, HBO Max, streaming titles now dominate the major television awards. In the drama categories, the 2025 Emmys were largely considered a neck-and-neck battle between HBO Max’s The Pitt and Apple TV’s Severance. No traditional network TV programs were nominated for Outstanding Drama.
Hulu’s New Handmaid’s Tale Spinoff Debuts To Stellar Rotten Tomatoes Score
Hulu’s new spinoff of The Handmaid’s Tale debuts with a stellar score on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its upcoming series premiere on April 8.
Today, streaming has become the norm for television production and viewing, but its dominance isn’t merely an inevitability of advancing technology. While the medium has its shortcomings, at its best, it also demonstrates a new level of freedom and quality in storytelling, a caliber that was put on the map with The Handmaid‘s Tale in 2017.
- Release Date
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2017 – 2025-00-00
- Network
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Hulu
- Showrunner
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Bruce Miller
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Elisabeth Moss
June Osborne / Offred / Ofjoseph
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