The Circle has moved from Netflix to Hulu for a reimagined season that will mix celebrity contestants with civilians and introduce audience voting in the U.S.; the show will be filmed in real time and is being repositioned as a fast-turnaround social experiment, with Susan House serving as showrunner.
The platform change follows seven seasons on Netflix. Netflix declined to renew The Circle after season seven concluded in October 2024, ending a run that began when the U.S. series launched on the streamer in 2020 and grew out of an earlier British format.
The move matters because the show is being altered at its core. Hulu’s edition will invite celebrity entrants to play alongside everyday competitors and will give U.S. viewers the ability to vote — a structural shift from the Netflix model, which featured only civilian players and no public voting. The series is backed by Studio Lambert, Motion Entertainment and Omaha Productions, signaling a push to retool a known property rather than build a new reality brand from scratch.
That retooling follows the format’s longer history: The Circle originally premiered on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, where it ran for three seasons between 2018 and 2021 before Netflix launched a U.S. version in 2020. Netflix’s U.S. edition ran for seven seasons from 2020 to 2024. Contestants live in separate apartments in the same building and communicate only through a proprietary app, choosing whether to present themselves authentically or under a different persona — a conceit that has driven much of the show’s strategy and drama.
The friction in the story is plain: Netflix declined to renew a series that had been counted among its early reality competition hits, and yet the format proved elastic enough that Hulu is betting on a high-profile overhaul. In April, a Walt Disney Television representative outlined plans for a concentrated push into serialized competition programming; the platform pickup can be read as part of that agenda. Whatever the corporate motivations, the practical effect for viewers and contestants is clear: live audience voting and celebrity players will change the incentives around authenticity, alliances and deception that defined the show on Netflix.
The most immediate unanswered question is timing. Hulu has not announced a premiere date for The Circle’s return, leaving the launch window and the first celebrity casting choices unconfirmed. Until Hulu sets a date and releases a cast list, the story is defined less by episodes than by format — by how quickly the game will turn, who will be allowed inside the building, and whether audience voting will tilt outcomes away from the isolated player dynamics that made the original versions compelling.
