Hulu Announces ‘The Great,’ ‘Animaniacs’ Season 2 Premiere Dates

Hulu is serving up a real bundle of new content in the months to come in 2021. Get ready for new episodes of your favorite series like The Great and Animaniacs, as well as new series like Dopesick and The Fool. Ahead of today’s Television Critics Association panel, the streamer presented their lineup of upcoming original programming for the rest of the year, with plenty of scripted and unscripted content on the way to your screen this coming fall and winter.

Elle Fanning returns as Catherine the Great in just a few short months, with a new season of the Emmy-nominated series set to follow her pregnancy. Scroll up to watch the first trailer for the new season, which will also star Nicholas Hoult, Phoebe Fox, Adam Godley, and more. Season 2 of The Great will premiere on Hulu on November 19.

And hellooooo to our beloved Animaniacs, who will also return for the second season of their revival series with 13 brand new episodes coming on November 5. Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are back on the Warner Bros. lot for more family-friendly antics, with plenty of pop culture parodies, musical sequences, and safety tips with their pals Pinky and the Brain and more.

In terms of new scripted series, Hulu has announced the release date of Dopesick, which will follow one company as they trigger the worst drug epidemic in American history. Going from the boardrooms of Big Pharma to communities around the country, the limited series will follow the events as told in the New York Times bestselling book by Beth Macy. Michael Keaton, Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg, Will Poulter, Kaitlyn Dever, and Rosario Dawson will star in Dopesick, which is set to release on Hulu this October 13.

Hulu also has two new true-crime series on the way with Dead Asleep and Captive Audience. Dead Asleep will explore a brutal murder that supposedly happened as the criminal was resting — or was it all just an incredibly convenient cover story? Then, Captive Audience is set to tell the story of Steven Stayner, a 7-year-old who mysteriously went missing from school in 1972, later returning nearly a decade later.

Three new food series are heating up at Hulu as well. Baker’s Dozen, which will hit the streamer this October 7, will follow 13 bakers on a competition to become the next viral baking sensation. Chef David Chang and documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville take on the changes in the food world with The Next Thing You Eat, which will land just a few weeks later on October 21. And finally, Padma Lakshmi will star in a new special debuting November 4, Taste the Nation: Holiday Edition, where she’ll venture around the country to learn new holiday traditions.

That’s not all — Hulu has a big comedy brewing for subscribers, too. The platform has just greenlit This Fool, a series set to follow “punk-ass bitch” Julio Lopez, an adult guy who crashes at home and helps everyone except himself. Inspired by creator Chris Estrada’s life, the half-hour comedy series will follow Julio’s “quest to overcome his codependency issues with his family as he navigates working-class life in South Central Los Angeles.”

All of these announcements come in the midst of a lot of media speculation over Hulu’s future. It’s part of the Disney Bundle of Disney+ and ESPN+, of course; but with the company focusing more and more on Disney+, where does that leave Hulu’s original programming? At least through the end of the year… Pretty packed.