This high-stakes thriller is the best thing on Hulu right now

The British have a history of making top-notch thrillers. Oftentimes, budgets for British shows aren’t as big as those given to American series, so they have to make up for it with solid writing and likable characters. That’s what happened with Red Eye, an ITV series that’s also available to watch on Hulu, which itself is a reliable streaming service for those looking for high-end drama.

Red Eye is unpretentious, exciting, and easy to binge. And if you start watching now, you’ll be caught up for the big finish to come.

Terror in the sky

Big crimes in small spaces

The first season of Red Eye aired on ITV in 2024. It’s about a Hong Kong-born British police officer named Hana Li (Jing Lusi) who’s tasked with escorting a British doctor named Matthew Nolan (Richard Armitage) from London to Beijing, where he’s been accused of murder. The British are loathe to extradite one of their own to China, but agree in the interest of not upsetting British-Sino relations during a delicate period, which sets up one of the macro-level storylines we’ll follow throughout the season. All Li has to do is keep Nolan alive during an overnight flight to Beijing. What could go wrong?

So much. Pretty soon, bodies start dropping. A meal meant for Nolan is eaten by someone else, who dies. A doctor colleague of his perishes mysteriously. Who’s doing it? Where could they be hiding? A plane is only so big, after all.

The first season of Red Eye makes great use of this confined space. Hana and the other characters explore every nook and cranny there is to explore on an airplane, including a few people in the audience may not even realize were there. In the meanwhile, we check in with Hana’s younger half-sister Jess (Jemma Moore) on the ground, who’s investigating the situation surrounding Dr. Nolan in her capacity as a journalist. Slowly, it starts to become clear that Nolan may have been framed, and that there are players in this game beyond the ones we know are on the board.

There’s very little wasted time in the first season of Red Eye. There are only six episodes and a limited cast of characters, but every moment counts. Almost every episode ends on a cliffhanger, which tempts you to watch just one before you call it quits.

Terror in the sky…again

Now on the ground

The second season of Red Eye expands the scope of the story, but remembers to fit in some high-stakes hijinx on a plane. This time, it’s Hana’s boss Madeline Delaney, the head of MI5 (Lesley Sharp), who’s dealing with it. A bomb on her plane will go off if the planet drops below an altitude of 20,000 feet, a twist on the Speed formula. Meanwhile, on the ground, Hana deals with an assassin (Tom Forbes) who’s picking off guests at a party at the U.S. embassy in London. As with the first season, things eventually snowball and we find out that everything is part of a bigger conspiracy, this time linked to a downed military plane.

Richard Armitage does show up briefly in this second season, although he doesn’t play nearly as important a role. He was the biggest name attached to the cast — he’s best known for playing Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit trilogy — so that’s a shame, but he’s ably replaced by Martin Compston as Clay Brody, a security officer who works with Hana to deal with the situation at the embassy. Their chemistry is prickly, combustible, and fun to watch.

The second season of Red Eye gives itself a little more runway at the end to explore what happens with the characters, which is appreciated. But it mostly brings more of what made the first season so watchable, for better and worse.

The inherent wackiness of the action movie

Bless Red Eye’s heart

Red Eye is a fun show to watch because it’s always hurtling towards the next plot twist. Seemingly every few minutes, we find a new corpse, or learn of a new person who’s really pulling the strings behind the scenes, or something. It definitely keeps you engaged, but it has to be said that the way the plot twists stack on top of each other do get a mite ridiculous. This is a not a slow-burning thriller that takes its time crossing every ‘I’ and dotting every ‘T.’ This is a mad cap ramble that could well fall apart if you start thinking about it too hard.

The solution is mostly not to think about it. There’s a tradition of action movies that sacrifice plausibility for entertainment value, and Red Eye flies high with the best of them. If you let yourself, you can even find value in the show’s logic-straining plot twists; after all, just because Red Eye takes itself seriously doesn’t mean you have to.

Bill and Holden bathed in colored police lights in Mindhunter

6 detective shows sharper, stranger, and better than Sherlock

Sherlock is a fun show, but these detective series make it look like it’s playing cops and robbers.

Yet more terror in the sky

There’s been no official word about a third season of Red Eye in the works, creator Peter A. Dowling has said he envisioned the show as a trilogy. The first two seasons were fairly popular, so the odds of it getting there are good. In the meanwhile, there are lots of other underappreciated shows on Hulu for you to discover and binge.