Asian Men Get to Be Fun and Sexual in New Hulu Series
By MK Choi | 25 Jul, 2026

“The Season,” set in Hong Kong’s high end, revels in decadence and bedroom scenes aplenty amid a young Chinese American woman’s quest to find justice for her father.

Jessie Mei Li’s Cola takes her place among Hong Kong’s watchful elite. (Promotional still from PCCW Media, SK Global and Hulu)

Hong Kong has rarely looked more beautiful—or more morally hazardous—than it does in Hulu’s The Season.

The six-part English-language drama opens the doors to a world of superyachts, horse races, charity galas, private clubs and apartments with views stretching across Victoria Harbour. Nearly everyone is impeccably dressed, sexually restless and concealing at least one fact that could ruin a marriage, a friendship or an entire family dynasty.

Chris Pang’s Andrew Fung shares a seemingly relaxed moment against the Victoria Harbour skyline. (PCCW, SK Global, Hulu Promotional still)

Into this social aquarium swims Coleen “Cola” Pierce, a striving young Chinese American who appears to have come to Hong Kong for a summer position with wealth-management entrepreneur Carrie Shen. In reality, Cola is hunting for evidence that could vindicate her imprisoned father and expose the people she believes destroyed him. The entire series became available on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ in the US on June 17, while Now TV carries it in Hong Kong and Viu distributes it across much of Asia, the Middle East and South Africa. 

The Season, produced by PCCW, and is now playing on Hulu.

The revenge plot gives The Season its forward motion, but much of its entertainment comes from simply watching attractive, profoundly privileged people flirt, cheat, drink, lie and occasionally tell each other the truth.

What makes that familiar formula feel refreshing is the ease with which its Asian men get to participate in the fun.

Men Who Are Desired, Not Merely Respectable

Asian male characters in American productions are often required to prove their representational worth. They must be heroic, brilliant, dutiful, wounded or exceptionally competent before they’re permitted to become romantic leads.

The Season dispenses with the entrance examination.

Its Asian men can be vain, sexy, funny, unreliable, jealous, loyal, reckless and occasionally ridiculous. They don’t have to symbolize virtuous Asian masculinity. They’re simply men whose wealth, bodies, marriages, appetites and mistakes matter to the story.

Justin Chien plays David Ho, an impeccably composed lawyer from a prominent family who has recently become Hong Kong’s most eligible bachelor following a divorce. David’s polish makes him attractive, but it also serves as protective packaging around a man carrying emotional and potentially dangerous secrets.

Chris Pang’s Andrew Fung is David’s opposite and best friend: louder, brasher, sarcastic and determined to make sure nobody overlooks either his hotel empire or the fortune that came with it. Andrew is married, boastful and sexually confident, though his swagger hides anxieties about status and acceptance among Hong Kong’s old-money families. 

Their friendship is one of the show’s liveliest relationships. David provides restraint while Andrew supplies provocation, blunt advice and the sort of loyalty that can survive both insults and betrayals.

Chien and Pang have described the two men as complementary personalities who fill gaps in one another. Pang compared them to yin and yang, while Chien emphasized that Andrew is the friend most likely to pull David out of trouble or say what everyone else is afraid to tell him. 

That rapport allows them to be genuinely amusing rather than merely positioned as ornamental romantic prizes.

Sex as Part of the Social Currency

Sex in The Season isn’t treated as a separate romantic subplot. It circulates through the same system as money, family names, club memberships and invitations.

Affairs can establish influence, provide escape or create vulnerabilities that another character might exploit. Desire can be sincere one moment and strategic the next. Even long-standing marriages contain negotiations over freedom, loyalty and the preservation of appearances.

The show’s intimate scenes are frequent enough to make sexuality part of its atmosphere rather than an exceptional event. Celina Jade, who plays Carrie Shen, has discussed shooting intimate and swimsuit scenes early in production because she was pregnant and beginning to show. She also said The Season was her first production using an intimacy coordinator, with performers establishing their boundaries before filming. 

That behind-the-scenes care matters because the series lets its Asian characters occupy a sexually adult world without turning their intimacy into either a joke or a statement of cultural rebellion.

David and Andrew are allowed to be desired by women, to desire women and to make impulsive sexual decisions. Yet their attractiveness doesn’t make them invulnerable. Sex often exposes precisely what each man has worked hardest to conceal.

The result isn’t a collection of idealized Asian heartthrobs. It’s something more useful: Asian men being permitted to have the entertainingly messy private lives that television has long granted affluent white antiheroes.

A Revenge Seeker Who Can’t Stay Detached

The men may be fun, but Cola remains the dramatic center.

Jessie Mei Li gives her a carefully controlled combination of alertness and awkwardness. Cola knows enough about elite behavior to imitate it but not enough to appear completely natural. Every misplaced question, borrowed dress or unguarded reaction threatens to reveal that she entered this circle with an agenda.

Li is a British actor born to an English mother and a Chinese-born father who grew up in Hong Kong. Before The Season, they became internationally known as Alina Starkov in Netflix’s fantasy drama Shadow and Bone, a role that similarly placed questions of mixed identity, belonging and social exclusion at the center of an elaborate genre story. 

Cola initially imagines that she can remain morally separate from the rich people she’s investigating. That confidence weakens as she develops attachments, witnesses private suffering and realizes that several apparent villains are also prisoners of the system they help maintain.

Her guide into that system is Carrie Shen, a self-made financial mogul played by Hong Kong-born actor Celina Jade, known internationally for Wolf Warrior 2 and the television series Arrow. Carrie is ambitious, glamorous and lonely—a woman who has accumulated enough money to enter the room but not enough pedigree to stop others from questioning whether she belongs there. 

Cola’s most formidable obstacle is Fiona Hext, played by Karena Lam. Fiona presides over Hong Kong society with the calm authority of someone who can destroy another person merely by withholding an invitation.

Lam brings considerable Asian screen prestige to the role. The Taiwan-born, Hong Kong-based actor and singer is a three-time Golden Horse Award winner, making Fiona more than a caricature of a rich society wife. Her severity is balanced by flashes of fear as she senses that her family, marriage and meticulously arranged world may be coming apart. 

Toby Stephens plays Fiona’s husband Christopher Hext, the billionaire heir whose family occupies the top of this social hierarchy. Stephens, familiar from Black Sails, Lost in Space and Percy Jackson and the Olympians, gives Christopher the practiced geniality of a man accustomed to having unpleasant realities removed before they reach him.

Actors Who’ve Waited for Roles Like These

For Justin Chien, David is a striking departure from the violent but emotionally inhibited gangster Charles Sun in The Brothers Sun.

Chien grew up between Taipei and Los Angeles and brought extensive martial-arts training to that Netflix series. In The Season, he gets to rely less on physical combat than on charm, suppressed emotion and the gradual failure of David’s composure. 

Chris Pang has spent more than 15 years moving between Australian, Asian and American productions. Born in Melbourne to a family with Chinese and Taiwanese roots, he first gained wide attention in Tomorrow, When the War Began and later appeared in Crazy Rich Asians, Charlie’s Angels, Palm Springs and Interior Chinatown. 

Pang has said that a majority-Asian ensemble enables performers to explore a broader spectrum of personalities rather than asking one character to represent an entire population. Andrew is a good example: he’s insecure and abrasive but also observant, protective and often extremely funny. 

A Writer Mixing Hong Kong and Hollywood

Creator and showrunner Yalun Tu devised The Season as a Hong Kong story told through the propulsive vocabulary of a Western revenge thriller.

Tu’s television credits include NCIS: Hawai‘i and Wu Assassins, and he co-created Amazon Japan’s supernatural romantic comedy My Undead Yokai Girlfriend. On The Season, he serves as creator, writer and executive producer, with the opening and concluding episodes carrying his writing credit. (Yahoo)

Tu has described the show as character-driven rather than simply another invitation to “eat the rich.” Its wealthy people can be selfish and destructive, but the series remains interested in why they behave as they do and what they fear losing. 

The production came together through Hong Kong’s PCCW Media and SK Global, the company behind Crazy Rich Asians, Delhi Crime and Thai Cave Rescue. SK Global executive Chloe Dan, one of The Season’s executive producers, oversees the studio’s international television slate after previous development and leadership roles at Picturestart and Twentieth Century Fox Television. 

PCCW Media chief Janice Lee also executive-produced the series. Lee has spent more than two decades expanding the company’s television business and spearheaded the growth of the Viu streaming service across Asian, Middle Eastern and African markets. 

A Director Who Understands Desire and Danger

Lead director Marialy Rivas gives all six episodes a coherent visual language: brilliant sunlight, expensive interiors and wide compositions that keep Hong Kong visible even during emotionally intimate encounters.

The Chilean filmmaker broke through internationally with Young & Wild, a sexually candid coming-of-age drama that won a screenwriting award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Her subsequent television work has included HBO’s Perry Mason and the British mystery drama The Jetty.

Rivas said she and cinematographer Sergio Delgado wanted The Season to look elegant and expensive while maintaining a current of danger beneath the beauty. Rather than retreating constantly into tight close-ups, they used wide-angle lenses and broader compositions so Hong Kong would remain a character in the drama. 

That approach captures the contradiction at the heart of the series. The yachts are real, the skyline is breathtaking and the bodies are beautiful—but nobody aboard is entirely safe.

More Than Another Rich-People Soap

The Season doesn’t reinvent the decadent ensemble thriller. Viewers will recognize elements of Revenge, The White Lotus, Succession and, inevitably, Crazy Rich Asians.

Its contribution lies instead in who gets to indulge in the genre.

Asian characters don’t stand outside the fantasy as observers, assistants or emblems of restraint. They own the yachts, sleep with the wrong people, tell filthy jokes, nurse hangovers, break vows and make catastrophic decisions.

Most importantly, its Asian men aren’t asked to choose between being admirable and being attractive.

They get to be funny and sexual, loving and selfish, ridiculous and dangerous—sometimes within the same champagne-fueled evening.