Netflix's Returning 10-Part Sleeper Hit Is Quietly Becoming the Best Show on Streaming

By ben Margen26 March 2026

While Kate Hudson has certainly dipped her toes in TV over the years, including her iconic role as Cassandra July in Glee, the two-time Oscar nominee has mostly been known for her incredible filmography. So, when she was announced as the lead of the Netflix sports comedy Running Point, created by Mindy Kaling, Elaine Ko, Ike Barinholtz, and David Stassen, fans were at the edge of their seats waiting to tune in.

Lucky for them, the series, which premiered on February 27, 2025, was certainly worth the wait. Not only was Hudson's role as the cutthroat Isla Gordon one of her best performances in years, but she was accompanied by a hilarious cast, sharp writing, and a plot that felt both fresh and charming to viewers. Per Deadline, the series scored 9.3 million views in its debut weekend, and ranked in the Top 10 across 83 countries. So, of course, it's no surprise that the series was renewed for Season 2, which is only a few weeks away now, on April 23.

What Will 'Running Point' Season 2 Be About?

In the first season of Running Point, Hudson's Isla had her work cut out for her. After her brother Cam (Justin Theroux) gets into a car accident after struggling with drug addiction, she's suddenly named the new president of her family's fictional basketball team, the Los Angeles Waves. Eager to prove herself, she throws herself into the job and — no pun intended — makes serious waves. In her new territory, she must also deal with her other siblings, Ness (Scott MacArthur) and Sandy (Drew Tarver), as well as the problematic players on the team, who all bring their own baggage.

10-TV-Shows-to-Watch-if-You-Love-‘Running-Point’

10 Great TV Shows to Watch if You Love ‘Running Point’

For while you're anxiously waiting for Season 2!

With a major loss marking the end of Season 1, Season 2 is picking up at a tough spot for the Waves, which only becomes yet another moment for Isla to prove herself. In the official synopsis, the series declares that she's "determined to prove she’s not just keeping the seat warm for her brother," especially now that the world is watching her bold moves. The blurb also teased a heightened rivalry between her and Cam, who's eager to win back his position as president. "What she doesn’t know is that Cam is quietly maneuvering behind the scenes to reclaim his post, turning every misstep into ammunition," the synopsis reads.

Therefore, much like in the first season, Isla will continue to stand up for herself and prove her place, even if that means protecting herself from her own family. "To survive the family power plays and the scrutiny of the board, she’ll have to rip up last season’s game plan and come up with a whole new playbook if she wants to close out the season on top," the synopsis detailed, adding that season 2 "raises the stakes, deepens the family drama, and finds even more comedy in what it takes to run a modern sports empire."

Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz
Which Fictional Hospital
Would You Work Best In?
The Pitt · ER · Grey's Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Ten questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

🏥ER

💉Grey's Anatomy

🔬House

🩺Scrubs

FIND YOUR HOSPITAL →

A critical patient comes through the door. What's your first instinct?
Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.

AStay completely present — block everything else out and work through it step by step, right now.
BTriage fast and delegate — get the right people on the right problems immediately.
CTrust my gut and move — I work best when I stop overthinking and just act.
DAsk the question everyone else is ignoring — what's the thing that doesn't fit?
ETake a breath, make a joke to cut the tension, and then get to work — panic helps no one.

NEXT QUESTION →

Why did you go into medicine in the first place?
The honest answer says more about you than the one you'd give in an interview.

ABecause I wanted to be where it matters most — right at the edge, when someone's life is actually on the line.
BBecause I wanted to help people — genuinely, one patient at a time, in a system that makes it hard.
CBecause I was drawn to the intensity of it — the stakes, the drama, the feeling of being fully alive.
DBecause medicine is the most interesting puzzle there is — and I needed a problem worth solving.
EBecause I wanted to make a difference — and also, honestly, I didn't know what else to do with my life.

NEXT QUESTION →

What do you actually want from the people you work with?
Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.

ACompetence and calm — I need people who don't fall apart when things get bad.
BTrust and reliability — I want to know that when I pass something off, it's handled.
CConnection — I want colleagues who become family, even if that gets complicated.
DIntelligence and the willingness to be challenged — I have no interest in people who just agree with me.
EFriendship — people I actually like spending twelve hours a day with, because those hours are going to happen either way.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you actually perform under extreme pressure?
The worst shifts reveal things about you that the good ones never will.

AI narrow in — everything irrelevant falls away and I become completely focused on what's in front of me.
BI lead — pressure is when I'm at my most useful, keeping everyone else on track while managing my own fear.
CI feel it fully and work through it — I don't pretend the fear isn't there, I just don't let it win.
DI get sharper — high stakes are clarifying. This is exactly the environment I think best in.
EI hold it together in the moment and fall apart slightly afterwards — which I've made my peace with.

NEXT QUESTION →

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it?
Every doctor who's worked a long shift has had to answer this question.

AI carry it. All of it. I don't look for ways to put it down — that weight is part of doing this work honestly.
BI process it and move — you have to, or the next patient suffers for the one you just lost.
CI feel it deeply and lean on the people around me — I don't think you're supposed to handle that alone.
DI go back over every decision — not to punish myself, but because I need to understand what I missed.
EI grieve it genuinely, find some way to laugh about something unrelated, and try to be kind to myself — imperfectly.

NEXT QUESTION →

How would your colleagues describe the way you work?
Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.

AIntense and completely present — no small talk during a shift, but exactly who you want there.
BSteady and dependable — not the flashiest in the room but never the one who drops something.
CPassionate and occasionally chaotic — brilliant on the hard cases, prone to drama everywhere else.
DBrilliant and difficult — right more often than anyone else, and everyone knows it, including me.
EWarm and self-deprecating — not the most intimidating presence, but genuinely good at this and easy to like.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure?
Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.

AProtocol is the floor, not the ceiling — I follow it until the patient needs something it can't provide.
BI respect it — the system is broken in places, but the structure is there for a reason and I work within it.
CI follow it until my instincts tell me not to — and my instincts are usually right, even when they cause problems.
DRules are for people who haven't thought hard enough about when to break them.
EI try to follow it and mostly do — with a few memorable exceptions that still come up in meetings.

NEXT QUESTION →

What kind of medical work do you find most compelling?
What draws your attention when you walk through those doors matters.

AEmergency and trauma — I want to see everything, handle anything, and never know what's coming next.
BGeneral emergency medicine — breadth over depth, keeping the whole machine running under impossible conditions.
CSurgery — I want to be in the room where the most consequential thing happening is happening right now.
DDiagnostics — the cases no one else can solve, the symptoms that don't add up, the answer hiding underneath everything.
EWhatever needs doing — I'm a generalist at heart and I find something interesting in almost every patient.

NEXT QUESTION →

What does this job cost you personally?
Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What's yours?

AEverything outside these walls — I've given this job my full attention and the rest of my life has gone around it.
BMy idealism, mostly — I came in believing the system could be fixed and I've made a complicated peace with that.
CStability — my personal life has been as chaotic as the OR, and that's not entirely a coincidence.
DMy relationships — I am not easy to know, and the people who've tried to would probably agree.
EMy sense of gravity — I use humour as a coping mechanism, which not everyone appreciates in a hospital.

NEXT QUESTION →

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back?
The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.

AThe fact that it's real — that nothing else I could be doing would matter this much, right now, today.
BThe patients — individual human beings who needed something and got it because I was there.
CThe people I work with — I have walked through impossible things with these people and I'd do it again.
DThe next unsolved case — there's always another puzzle, and I'm not done yet.
EBecause despite everything — the exhaustion, the loss, the absurdity — I actually love this job.

REVEAL MY HOSPITAL →

Your Assignment Has Been Made
You Belong In…

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

The Pitt

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown. The Pitt doesn't romanticise the work — it puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn't let you look away. You are someone who needs their work to be real, who finds meaning not in the drama surrounding medicine but in medicine itself, and who has made peace with the fact that this job will take from you constantly and give back in ways that are harder to name. You don't need the chaos to be aestheticised. You need it to be honest. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center is exactly that — and you would not want to be anywhere else.

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential. County General is built on the shoulders of people who show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without requiring the job to be anything other than what it is. You care deeply about patients as individual human beings, you believe in the system even when it fails you, and you understand that emergency medicine at its core is about holding the line between order and chaos for just long enough. ER is television about endurance, and you have it.

Grey's Anatomy

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door. Grey Sloan is a hospital where the personal and the professional are permanently, chaotically entangled, and where that entanglement produces both the greatest disasters and the most remarkable saves. You are someone who feels things fully, who forms deep attachments to the people you work with, and who understands that the most extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection. It's messy here. You would not have it any other way.

House

You are drawn to the problem above everything else. Not the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you'd deny it — but the case as a puzzle, the symptom that doesn't fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one. Princeton-Plainsboro is a hospital that exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind, and everyone around that mind is there because they are smart enough and stubborn enough to keep up. You work best when the stakes are highest, when the standard answer is wrong, and when the only way forward is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you would do here.

Scrubs

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure, and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time. Sacred Heart is a hospital where the laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable — where a terrible joke can get you through a terrible moment, and where the most ridiculous people are also, on their best days, remarkably good doctors. You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field. You lean on the people around you and you let them lean back. Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job — and you are still very much in the middle of that process, which is exactly right.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

'Running Point' Is One of Netflix's Best Comedies

From the synopsis alone, it's safe to say Season 2 will carry on with the magic of Season 1. After all, in addition to being a story about a kick-ass female lead busting down barriers,Running Point also balances being a workplace sports comedy and a family drama. With that mix, the series sets itself up for intense, high-energy moments like in the games or major negotiations, but also softer, more tender moments too. Isla, for instance, has to exude confidence as president of the Waves, but the show doesn't shy away from showing her most vulnerable moments and flaws either, like in her ill-fated relationship to Max Greenfield's Lev. The same can be said about Tarvey's Sandy, who rolls his eyes at his siblings' antics and hides his very devoted boyfriend (Scott Evans) from them, but also teams up with them for a grand gesture in the season finale.

With all that said, it's safe to say fans are likely in for a treat when the second season of Running Point premieres next month. With a stellar cast, a fully-fleshed-out lead, and a bright, optimistic tone that will have fans of Ted Lasso buzzing, the series is the perfect, comforting binge, and one of the best Netflix originals to date.