Hulu snags The Circle following Netflix run

Hulu has greenlit its own US version of Studio Lambert’s social experiment format The Circle, 18 months after Netflix debuted its seventh season of the show.

The Circle is produced by All3Media’s Studio Lambert and debuted on Channel 4 in the UK in 2018, running for three seasons.

It was then optioned in numerous countries by Netflix and marked one of its first pushes into unscripted reality formats, with local versions produced in Brazil and France.

The US version debuted on Netflix in 2020 and ran for seven seasons, with the final episode launching in October 2024. The streamer declined to renew further, leaving Hulu to swoop. All3Media International handles format and tape sales.

Hulu’s show is again being produced by Studio Lambert and WPP’s Motion Entertainment, alongside Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions.

It will also feature celebrities rather than only civilians, who had populated all seven seasons of Netflix’s show, while audience voting is also being introduced. Susan House (The Bachelor) is showrunner.

Host and cast have not been revealed, but the show wil be shot in real time to allow viewers votes to dictate how the game plays out.

The format houses contestants in separate apartments in a single building and lets them communicate through a special voice-activated social media platform.

Players never meet but rate each other frequently, with unpopular players ‘blocked’. The most popular player wins a cash prize.

Exec producers include Tim Harcourt, Jack Burgess, Niall O’Driscoll and Stephen Lambert from Studio Lambert, Omaha Productions’s Peyton Manning, Jamie Horowitz and Colin Campbell, Motion Entertainment’s Martin Oxley and Chet Fenster.

The pick-up follows Hulu’s order for The Mob, a competition format that features celebrities living in a villa while “shaking down, hustling and whacking their way to win up to $250,000”. Studio Lambert is also attached to that show, alongside STV Studios’ Primal Media, with House also showrunner.