• Hulu has renewed The Testaments for Season 2, one week before the Season 1 finale drops on May 27.
• The Handmaid’s Tale sequel has racked up over 45 million hours streamed globally on Hulu and Disney+.
• Viewership grew 76% from the premiere to episode 8, based on first-day views.
• Chase Infiniti stars as Agnes, with Ann Dowd returning as Aunt Lydia and Elisabeth Moss making a surprise guest appearance as June Osborn.
• No premiere date for Season 2 has been announced yet.

Gilead isn’t done with us yet. Hulu has officially renewed The Testaments for a second season, the streamer confirmed Wednesday — and the timing couldn’t be more dramatic. The pickup lands just one week before the Season 1 finale drops on May 27, and just hours after the season’s penultimate episode became available to stream.

“A secret we couldn’t keep any longer,” read the caption on the show’s Instagram reveal. “‘The Testaments’ will be back for Season 2 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.”

The news shouldn’t come as a total shock. According to Deadline, the show has been on a genuine growth trajectory — not just holding steady, but actually building. Episode 4 saw a 20% viewership bump over the premiere after just one day of streaming. By episode 8, that number had climbed to 76% above where the show started. The series has now accumulated over 45 million hours streamed globally across Hulu and Disney+, and the season isn’t even finished yet. It’s also sitting at a Certified Fresh 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.

What The Testaments Is — and Why It’s Clicking

The Testaments, which debuted April 8 with three episodes, is based on Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning 2019 novel and serves as a sequel to the Emmy-winning The Handmaid’s Tale. Where that series centered on Elisabeth Moss’s June Osborn and her harrowing existence as a handmaid, this one shifts the lens to the next generation — specifically two teenage girls navigating life inside Gilead’s gilded cage.

Chase Infiniti plays Agnes, a young woman raised entirely within the regime, dutiful and pious and dressed in the purple robes of a future Commander’s wife. Lucy Halliday plays Daisy, an American who crosses into Gilead as a spy and must take on the white robes of a Pearl Girl — an outsider convert. As they move through Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school for future wives, where obedience is enforced with brutal divine justification, their bond quietly becomes something that could shake Gilead to its foundation.

Ann Dowd is back as Aunt Lydia, the morally complex enforcer who has become one of the most fascinating characters in this entire universe. And in what turned out to be a genuine surprise for viewers, Elisabeth Moss returned for a guest appearance, reprising her role as June Osborn — a moment that connected the two series in exactly the way fans were hoping for.

The show’s pacing has been deliberately measured. As MovieWeb’s Christine Persaud noted in her Season 1 review, “There are shocking moments that reinforce the same horrors we saw in The Handmaid’s Tale. But this is mostly traded for backstory context, restrained nuance, and setup for action that is sure to come with a second season.” That’s not a criticism so much as a description of the show’s strategy — it’s building something, and the audience has been patient enough to follow.

Part of what makes the storytelling feel so different from its predecessor is the perspective. Agnes has grown up inside Gilead. She doesn’t experience it as a horror — it’s simply the world she knows. That gap between what the audience understands and what Agnes herself understands creates a particular kind of tension, one that’s quieter than June’s fury but no less unsettling.

The Star Power Behind the Show’s Breakout Moment

Chase Infiniti’s casting brought with it an unexpected wave of attention. The show premiered on April 8, just a couple of weeks after the end of an awards season in which Infiniti went from a relative unknown to an award-winning movie star for her work in One Battle After Another. That kind of momentum is rare, and Hulu clearly benefited from the timing.

Behind the camera, The Testaments is in familiar hands. Bruce Miller, who created The Handmaid’s Tale for television, adapted Atwood’s novel and serves as showrunner. Elisabeth Moss is among the executive producers alongside Warren Littlefield, Steve Stark, Shana Stein, Maya Goldsmith, John Weber, Sheila Hockin, Daniel Wilson, Fran Sears, and Mike Barker, who directed the first three episodes and the finale. The series is produced by MGM Television and 20th Television.

The full ensemble also includes Mabel Li, Amy Seimetz, Brad Alexander, Rowan Blanchard, Mattea Conforti, Zarrin Darnell-Martin, Eva Foote, Isolde Ardies, Shechinah Mpumlwana, Birva Pandya, and Kira Guloien.

No premiere date for Season 2 has been set, and production timing hasn’t been announced. The Season 1 finale streams May 27 on Hulu and Disney+ — and based on the way this show has been building, it sounds like it’s going to leave plenty to look forward to.

The post The Testaments Renewed for Season 2 at Hulu appeared first on Cream.

• Lisa Ann Walter’s first-ever stand-up special, It Was an Accident, is now streaming on Hulu
• The special was filmed at Philadelphia’s Helium Comedy Club and produced by her Abbott Elementary co-star Sheryl Lee Ralph
• Walter, 62, has been doing stand-up for 37 years — this is her first special
• She’s also making her Off Broadway debut in Heathers: The Musical through June 22
• Abbott Elementary is gearing up for its sixth season on ABC

Lisa Ann Walter has been making people laugh for nearly four decades. She’s been a road comic, a sitcom star, a beloved nanny in a Lindsay Lohan classic, and now one of TV’s favorite teachers on Abbott Elementary. And somehow, until this week, she had never had a stand-up special.

That changes now. Lisa Ann Walter: It Was an Accident is streaming on Hulu starting May 15 — and if you’ve ever wondered what Melissa Schemmenti would be like completely uncensored, this is your answer.

“Comedy is the reason that I wanted to be a performer,” Walter said at the New York City celebration this week, surrounded by friends, family, and Abbott co-stars. “It was why God put me on the planet — to make people laugh.”

37 Years in the Making

The special was filmed last summer at a sold-out show at Helium Comedy Club in Center City Philadelphia — the city where Abbott Elementary is set, and a place Walter has come to think of as an adopted hometown. Over the past few summers, she’d been bringing her stand-up show back to Helium, building something real with Philly crowds before the cameras ever rolled.

“There was a reason why we shot it in Philly,” she said. “Because they don’t fake it there. If you’re not funny, they let you know. They let you know when they love you.”

She described the city’s fans the way a coach talks about a team they’d go to war with. “They are incredibly warm and loving if they like you,” she told TV Insider. “They have super-pride of their city. They’re very much into being Philly. And so everything about it is like, ‘No one likes us, we don’t care,’ and they’re fine with rioting even if they win.” She was the Grand Marshal of the Italian Heritage Day Parade there, rode in the Thanksgiving parade, and remembers a woman on the parade route cursing a blue streak while complimenting her. “I actually wound up saying, ‘Can I take a video of you?'”

The special was introduced by — and produced by — her Abbott Elementary co-star Sheryl Lee Ralph, who plays the prim kindergarten teacher Barbara Howard and is, in real life, Walter’s closest friend. Ralph caught her comedy act twice, pushed her to turn it into a special, produced it herself, and pitched it directly to Hulu.

“She’s like, girl, you’re going to be on stage with red velvet drapes and a gold jacket. And it’s going to be in Philadelphia,” Walter recalled. So that’s exactly what happened — Walter delivered an hour-long set in a gold jacket designed by Ralph’s own dressmaker.

“I don’t like it when we sit on the sidelines of our own lives and potential — I don’t want it for myself, and I didn’t want it for her,” Ralph said. “Everything she said, I did,” Walter added simply.

Their friendship, by the way, runs on TCM marathons and shoe shopping. “We love a good shoe shop,” Ralph said. “See the jewels on your feet, and feel the comfort.”

What the Special Is Actually About

“It’s raw,” Walter says, and she means it. The set ranges from political scandals and generational divides to the specific joys and indignities of being a woman right now. There are zingers aimed squarely at teachers in the audience (“I don’t have a joke for you: That’s what your salary is for”), observations about adult women with baby voices, and bits about Gen X that will hit differently if you grew up watching The Parent Trap. A Skims bodysuit may or may not be sacrificed in the process.

The title, It Was an Accident, is a spoiler of sorts — Walter is a mother of four, and how that came to be is woven through the material. She’s 62, she has zero filters left, and she’s leaning into all of it.

“Nothing makes me happier besides my kids than getting on a stage and making people laugh,” she said. And watching the special, it shows.

Her material comes from, as she put it over lunch with the New York Times recently, “the insanity of being a grown-ass woman with [expletive] to say.” Then she corrected herself: “It’s not even insanity. It is the boldness of having zero [expletive] left in life.”

“There’s always been women truth-tellers, rageful,” she added. “We’ve always been there, just back in the day, they used to burn us as witches.”

The Career That Led Here

Walter started doing stand-up after hearing a Bill Cosby joke about childbirth and thinking: what does he know about it? She was a young working mother, she had material, and she went to the clubs. She built a following on the road through the ’90s, developed two sitcoms, and became Chessy — the warm, cuffed-denim nanny in the 1998 Disney remake of The Parent Trap — a role that quietly meant the world to a generation of kids with secrets they couldn’t quite name yet.

Sherri Shepherd, the talk-show host who met Walter on the stand-up circuit in the ’90s, has watched her command stages for thirty years. “She just gets on the stage, and she can command it,” Shepherd said. “I’m the girl that hides behind her arm, like peeking over her shoulder, going, ‘Yeah, what she said!’ And she gets respect from any kind of crowd.”

There were film roles too — opposite Tom Cruise in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, dancing with Richard Gere in Shall We Dance? — and then, around 50, the work started thinning out. The best-friend-and-sidekick roles that had been her bread and butter were going elsewhere. Family members floated the idea of a real estate license. She thought about leaving Los Angeles for Atlanta.

Shepherd helped pull her back to open mics after her second marriage ended. “Once she got on the stage, I was so proud of her because it was like, she’s back. And she’s got so much more to say because she’s got life and pain up under her.”

Then came Abbott Elementary.

“Nothing makes us feel better,” Walter said of the show’s connection with educators. “The week that we did the pilot, I said, if only teachers watch us, we’re a monster hit.”

Now she has a Times Square billboard — something that hit her harder than she expected. “I used to drive through when I was doing stand-up back in the day with my baby in the backseat, and now there’s a billboard in the middle of Times Square,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for 37 years, and this is my first special. It just goes to show you, you never know when it’s going to happen for you, and it’s never too late.”

What’s Next

Walter isn’t slowing down for a second. She’s currently making her Off Broadway debut in Heathers: The Musical through June 22, playing dual roles — a mom and a spunky teacher — and this week, three of her Abbott co-stars (Tyler James Williams, Chris Perfetti, and William Stanford Davis) filled a row in the audience. She’s also competing in the Celebrity Jeopardy! semifinals after winning in 2024. A cookbook is in the works. An animated show. More comedy.

Ralph put it cleanly: “She’s this big, bold, brassy babe, and she is still living her life and enjoying it; people of any age want to see that.”

And Abbott Elementary is already gearing up for season six, which means Melissa Schemmenti isn’t going anywhere.

“I’d like to think that I went from being a cautionary tale to an inspiration,” Walter said. “I want to have fun, I want to do everything there is to do — because as my depressing Sicilian great-grandparents used to say, you spend a long time in a box.”

The post Lisa Ann Walter’s First Stand-Up Special Is Finally Here appeared first on Cream.

• Zoë Kravitz publicly called out Hulu as “tacky” after they used her canceled show High Fidelity to reference her engagement to Harry Styles.
• Hulu posted a photo of Kravitz in character with a caption nodding to Styles’ new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally — then deleted it after her comment.
• Kravitz has repeatedly criticized Hulu for canceling High Fidelity in 2020, calling it a “big mistake” and slamming the platform for its lack of shows led by women of color.
• Page Six broke the news last month that Kravitz and Styles are engaged after eight months of dating and are already planning two weddings.

Zoë Kravitz has had enough of Hulu — and she made that very clear in two words.

Last week, the streamer posted a photo of Kravitz as her High Fidelity character Robyn Brooks on Instagram, captioning it: “Robyn Brooks definitely has ‘Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally’ on her playlist.” The caption was a nod to Harry Styles’ fourth studio album, released March 6 — and, of course, to the fact that Kravitz is now engaged to the man who made it.

Kravitz, 37, didn’t let it slide. She went straight to the comments and tagged the Disney-owned platform with a simple verdict: “This is tacky @hulu.”

The post has since been deleted.

Fans backed her up immediately. As one put it, they’d “be pissed too if the network that cancelled my show used my personal life as advertisement six years later.” And that context matters — because this isn’t just a minor social media spat. It’s the latest chapter in a years-long frustration Kravitz has had with Hulu over what happened to High Fidelity.

A Cancellation Kravitz Never Got Over

The gender-flipped comedy — based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel and inspired by the John Cusack film adaptation — premiered on Valentine’s Day 2020 and ran for 10 episodes. Fans were hooked. Then, in August of that year, Hulu pulled the plug.

Kravitz was not quiet about it. At the time, she fired back on Instagram with a pointed dig at the streamer for canceling its only show led by a woman of color: “At least Hulu has a ton of other shows starring women of color we can watch. Oh wait,” she wrote, responding to a message of condolence from Tessa Thompson.

Two years later, she was still feeling it. “They didn’t realize what that show was and what it could do,” she told Elle magazine in 2022, calling the cancellation a “big mistake.” “The amount of letters, DMs, people on the street and women that look like us — like, that love for the show, it meant something to people.”

That fanbase never really moved on either. Years later, people are still commenting on High Fidelity posts hoping for some kind of revival. So when Hulu tried to use that same canceled show — and Kravitz’s very personal relationship — as engagement bait, the reaction was never going to be warm.

The Engagement That Changed Everything

Page Six broke the news last month that Kravitz and Styles, 32, are engaged after eight months of dating. Sources told Page Six that the couple is already planning two weddings and have talked about starting a family together.

The pair were first linked publicly back in August of last year when they were spotted walking arm-in-arm in Italy. Neither has made a formal statement about their relationship — which makes Hulu’s very public, very uninvited reference to it land even more awkwardly.

For his part, Styles has opened up about where his head is at. In a March interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, he got candid about what he’s working toward. “I had a real honest conversation with myself about, ‘Okay, in five years, what do I want my life to look like? And then how do I make changes to aim at that?'” he said. “I want to be fulfilled and I want to be in great relationships with people.”

He kept it simple after that: “I want a family.”

Hulu, meanwhile, got the message — just not the one they were going for.

The post Zoë Kravitz Calls Out Hulu’s ‘Tacky’ Harry Styles Post appeared first on Cream.