The Handmaid’s Tale series creator Bruce Miller has a catchphrase. Usually prefaced by an exasperated sigh and a chuckle, the affable writer-producer will say that he wishes his Hulu dystopian drama wasn’t so relevant or topical.
Six seasons in, this might as well be a cue for any progressive within his earshot to burst into tears.
When it premiered in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale was primed to be inhaled by the zeitgeist as a short-hand for America’s real-life culture wars circa Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration. The red dresses that characters like star Elisabeth Moss’s June were forced to wear as they were pushed into “careers” of sexual servitude for their puritanical government overlords became the uniforms of real-life armies that marched, voted, called administrators and generally just fought to ensure that we nolite te bastardes carborundorum (a phrase taken from Handmaid’s source material, Margaret Atwood’s similarly named novel, and that essentially means “don’t let the bastards grind you down”).
And it worked. For a while. Kind of. Voting increased during the 2018 midterm election and the 2020 presidential election saw the highest rate of turnout for a national election in 120 years. Movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter fought against institutional sexism and racism even as the ghosts of Trump’s administration haunted issues like health care reform and abortion rights well into Joe Biden’s administration.
The problem was that slowly somehow, people stopped fighting. Voter turnout for the 2024 presidential election dipped. Kamala Harris lost her bid for the White House. Trump was elected for a second term. There are still nationwide marches. They’re just happening in April instead of right after the January inauguration. Everyone just seems … tired.
There’s a quote from Atwood’s book that gets used a lot in these situations:
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
As with the politics it represented, audiences turned their backs on the series version of The Handmaid’s Tale. It was called everything from torture porn to repetitive; that it was too reliant on Moss’s June and her god complex and white saviorisms. These critiques are not wrong. June has probably defeated death more times than Grey’s Anatomy’s Meredith. The final season, which premieres its first three episodes on Apr. 8, shows that she’s not the only one immune to immortality.
Also, it’s exhausting to be scared all the time. A sort of Stockholm Syndrome sets in with an audience who is taught to believe that very awful and gruesome deaths await at every corner. Look, I haven’t been able to watch the show at night since the first season when they ripped a woman out of the arms of Alexis Bledel’s Emily, strung her up and sped off even before she stopped breathing. But I am also pretty sure I spent the remainder of the third season multitasking on my phone after we were supposed to believe that someone Moss’s size could kill a mountain like Christopher Meloni’s Commander Winslow with nothing but a pen.
So there’s a sick irony that Handmaid’s is returning for its final season just as Trump gets settled into his second term. Are we all too exhausted to care about either of these things? Is there a place for Handmaid’s in 2025 like there was in 2017? Does a show that warns of complacency when no one’s paying attention to it still make a sound?
Season six showrunners Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman have the trepidatious task of sticking a landing with the final Handmaid’s episodes while also leaving enough open doors to welcome in The Testaments, the upcoming series based on Atwood’s 2019 also-named sequel novel that checks in with some of these characters. The story they’ve opted for isn’t hope exactly, but more wish-fulfillment. If you are a progressive who has sat through too many awkward Thanksgiving dinners with conservative relatives or who cackles at every post in the Leopards Ate My Face subreddit, then has Hulu got a show for you.
As was teased last season, when Yvonne Strahovski’s Serena Joy found herself to be an unwed mother who nearly lost her own child to the kind of family she used to idealize and Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia learned that her “girls” whom she’d forced to become handmaids weren’t actually as rewarded and protected as she’d been promised, some of those self-righteous zealots who were involved with trampling the United States to bits will have second thoughts this year. New characters, like Timothy Simons’ in-it-for-the-perks young commander and Josh Charles’ devout and protective older one, will symbolize the growing division within the ranks of a world that’s always been built on contradictions. Like members of our own political parties, the characters in Handmaid’s are in a see-sawing power imbalance as their intended message gets warped and radicalized and it (depending on how you look at it) evolves or mutates.
This can be a satisfying ending, but not necessarily a realistic one (or as realistic as one can be for a world where, a couple seasons ago, two key characters are—totally by fate or divine power and certainly not by convenient storytelling—the sole survivors of a bomb explosion that wipes out whatever’s left of Chicago). More important: the final season, where barely armed and barely trained resistance fighters somehow still win battles and once-sadistically evil masterminds grow moral compasses, is also not a show that those of us who stopped fighting and stayed at home watching TV deserve to have.
The first three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale season six premiere Apr. 8 on Hulu.
Whitney Friedlander is an entertainment journalist with, what some may argue, an unhealthy love affair with her TV. A former staff writer at both Los Angeles Times and Variety, her writing has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vulture, The Washington Post and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, daughter, and cats.
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