Every Way to Stream Foreign Language Shows
Our rundown of the best streaming services for foreign-language dramas and comedies in the U.S. worth watching.
There is a famous line Bruce Willis utters in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element: “I only speak two languages: English and Bad English.” The movie may be ~30 years old, but the sentiment about Americans remains true: we are not a bilingual culture the way you find to our north in Canada or across the pond in Europe. Our mainstream entertainment culture rarely finds itself dominated by non-English movies or TV, and when it does, it tends to be an outlier, like Squid Game or Parasite.
However, it is unfair of Parasite’s director, Bong Joon Ho, to suggest that Americans are routinely defeated by the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” The problem is that, for decades upon decades, non-English-language TV series and films weren’t promoted to mass audiences in the U.S.
Of all the things the streaming revolution has done in the last decade, the one that does the most good is the globalization of entertainment. For the first time in history, Americans can easily access shows from around the world in just about any language, and it turns out they want to, as shown by the rise of K-Dramas on Netflix, the launch of multiple niche-focused streaming services dedicated to foreign language shows, and the ever-growing sections on the large-scale mainstream services.
Here’s our guide to the best services to check out if you’re looking for foreign language shows, and where to stream them.
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MHz Choice
I don’t think it will surprise people too much to learn that the best American-based foreign language niche service, MHz Choice, grew out of PBS, started by the Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corporation. Two small-time local Northern Virginia stations, WNVT and WNVC, initially launched “World View TV” in 1996 to stand out from the crowd, eventually rebranding as MHz Networks. The PBS stations eventually spun it off in 2013; the two shuttered a few years later, but by then, MHz Choice had been launched in 2015 as an add-on streaming service. Today, MHz is one of the longest-running and most successful niche services dedicated to bringing the best foreign-language titles to the U.S.
MHz Choice is our primary recommendation partly because it has made a point of filling in the gaps left by other, better-known services. When Babylon Berlin left Netflix, MHz picked it up and will stream the fifth and final season in 2027. It also rescued the Das Boot TV series, left in the trash pile by Hulu after Season 1, and is now streaming its remaining four seasons. The more Walter Presents finds success with renamed/rebranded SOKO franchise series, the more MHz adds to the roster (always under the show’s real name, too). It’s also the only one that’s growing via mergers, having swallowed competitor Topic wholesale in 2024.
Ani Bundel
If one is to add a niche service to one’s regular viewing, it ought to be in conversation with its peers, and that’s the difference we’ve found with MHz Choice versus many of the other standalone niche services, and why it continues to be our top recommendation to anyone looking to get into series from across the pond.
Viaplay/Viki
In contrast, our other two single-focus foreign-language services are much harder for viewers to get into because the shows they carry don’t really have counterparts elsewhere in the U.S. market. One would think that would make them more popular: Viaplay, for example, is the only service dedicated to Nordic Noir; Viki (styled Rakuten Viki) is the Asian fusion of streaming services, with offerings that range from K-pop concerts to J-dramas to Chinese and Taiwanese soaps.
However, perhaps because they are products of other countries (Viaplay is a Nordic-based network, Viki was originally started in Singapore before Rakuten bought them out), the shows they tend to choose are wholly unrelated to what else is available on American streaming. Viaplay has one series, Rebus, a remake of an older PBS series which airs on the BBC in the U.K., but otherwise, their listings read like Walter’s Leftovers. Viki has a lot of Korean-based television, but it seems to almost deliberately eschew the type of shows that are super popular on Netflix.
Ani Bundel
Viki is a pretty solid company; it is probably worth subscribing to for the K- and J-drama enthusiast. But we really cannot recommend Viaplay, and we highly doubt it will still be a going concern by the mid-2030s.
Walter Presents on PBS Passport
We’ve done a deep dive on Walter Presents before; the company was originally started by Walter Iuzzolino alongside co-producers Jo McGrath and Jason Thorpe, and launched as a brand on Channel 4’s streaming service in 2016.
The closest comparison to Walter Presents is, ironically, PBS Masterpiece. Technically known as a “franchise brand,” Masterpiece creates a season of television by stringing together multiple imports that are deemed “the best of British dramas” for American audiences. Walter Presents strings together a season of TV by stringing together “the best of European foreign language series” for British audiences – and since the launch of PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel, for American audiences as well.
(We’ll note that Prime Video has its own extensive international offerings as well as the PBS channel. However, the search function is basically unusable, which is why we never recommend Prime for anything.)
Ani Bundel
Since Walter Presents is, in effect, the U.K.’s answer to Masterpiece, we’ve treated it like the British show it technically is, even if the actual titles that make up the season usually hail from France, Spain, Germany, and Norway. It’s also given us a front-row seat to Iuzzolino’s growth as a producer. In the early 2020s, he, McGrath, and Thorpe started a second company, Eagle Eye Drama (now owned by ITV Studios), whose mission was to create English-language remakes of the most successful Walter Presents series. While not all of them have been a success, it has kept Walter Presents’ relevancy front and center, as your next PBS favorite might start as a Friday binge arrival from overseas.
Acorn TV/Sundance Now
We did a full deep dive on Acorn TV and the AMC Global family of streaming services, which have been shifting and rebranding as we’ve reached the middle of the decade. One of the original streaming services that launched towards the end of the aughts, Acorn Media Group was a longtime physical-media company that switched to direct streaming along with Netflix and Amazon around 2010.
Backed by RLJ Entertainment, which also held the majority stake in Agatha Christie Ltd, it was the only way to stream PBS’s most popular shows for nearly a decade, until PBS Passport launched in 2019. It also meant that when PBS Passport launched, Acorn TV started taking its cues from what public broadcasting was giving its audience, and if that included foreign language shows, then so be it. The unexpected competition from BritBox caused Acorn TV’s focus to shift more toward Oceania- and Canada-made shows than strictly British ones, making foreign language series a sensible addition, if not nearly as extensive as Walter Presents.
Ani Bundel
Meanwhile, Sundance Now has been undergoing a total rebrand now that the film festival it’s named for is moving house from Utah. We’ve noted that all the British shows that were once on Sundance Now are gone; however, in their place, there’s now a slew of movies that premiered at Sundance and its sister film festivals worldwide – many of which are not in English. So while viewers who once subscribed to Sundance for the British series have probably canceled, those looking for boundary-pushing foreign-language fare from Berliner, Venice, or TIFF should take a second look.
Criterion Channel/Mubi
Speaking of foreign-language movies, we would be remiss not to mention both Mubi and the Criterion Channel.
These streaming services rarely come up in our conversations, since we are a television-based site, and they are strictly movie-focused. However, Mubi has spent the last few years being what Sundance Now should have been and is now probably the network’s biggest competitor in the foreign-language film festival space.
As for the Criterion Channel, it’s right there in the name, and in the closet of films it sticks our favorite actors into – these are the movies that the Criterion Collection has deemed worthy of preservation, regardless of language. We’d probably pick subscribing to Criterion over Mubi if we had to choose, but it’s honestly a toss-up.
Netflix’s Foreign Language Section
In the mainstream space, Netflix has the largest collection of foreign language TV series, hands down. We have a lot of issues with Netflix as a company, but no one can argue that it saw the coming globalization of television via streaming long before anyone else. Back when Disney+ was just an idea Bob Iger was tossing around, Netflix was importing foreign language shows as “Netflix Originals” outside their home country to help pad out those 60+ show-strong monthly debut lists. When Amazon was spending a billion American dollars to make a single season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Netflix was making deals with networks like TF1 to create an entire French-language subsection by making their library available globally.
The result is that it had a head start like nobody else, not just in K-dramas, but in foreign-language shows from every country in the world. If you have Netflix and want to see what’s available, search under “International Movies & TV” to see all their offerings.
Hulu’s Foreign Language Section
As we noted recently when the trailer for City of Blood arrived, despite being a brand whose entire identity rests on a rapidly fading ideal of American imperialism and cultural hegemony, Disney is determined to survive. If that means commissioning series set across Europe, in languages other than English, then by god, that’s what they make. If they have to sign with a French network to flood their service with French offerings, fine. Whatever Netflix does, Disney will too.
However, unlike Netflix, which loves to boast about its extensive international slates, Disney absolutely does not want Americans to know about this. That’s why everything it makes for the foreign market is shipped to Hulu and binge-dumped with little marketing. If you search under International on Hulu, you will get the motherload of offerings, which is far more extensive than you would think.
HBO Max’s Foreign Language Section
Finally, there’s HBO Max. HBO, as a network, has aired foreign-language shows and movies since before it was cool, and has been importing and co-producing foreign-language shows since the 2017/2018 TV season. Sadly, the service is in limbo as the antitrust lawsuit against its merger with Paramount moves forward, and – should Paramount+ prevail – will almost certainly disappear as it’s converted into American State Television.
As it is, finding foreign-language series on HBO Max is not easy. “International” brings up Discovery Networks claptrap (House Hunters, 90 Day Fiancé), and “Foreign Language” is a search that shouldn’t be undertaken with children in the room.
The best way we’ve found is to search under “Drama” or “Comedy” on “HBO dot com” (NOT HBO Max), and once you’ve decided on a title, then go search for it on HBO Max.
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