Handmaid’s Tale Is Somehow All the More Terrifying as a Hulu Show

The series is based on the 1985 novel, but it feels perfectly suited to 2017.
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George Kraychyk/Hulu

June has a happy life, full of ordinary problems. A slow Uber makes her best friend late to dinner. She procrastinates by going to a barbecue. Said best friend criticizes her husband. But slowly, and then all at once, she faces problems of a different scale: A tyrannical regime takes control of her bank accounts, her child, her body. After that, it's her flashbacks, those glimpses of a life that looks very familiar in 2017, that make the new adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale especially resonant—and its dystopia especially unsettling.

The first two episodes of Hulu's show, out now, won't be entirely familiar to the many recent readers of Margaret Atwood's 1985 classic. (In the book, the protagonist, now called June, didn't even have a name beyond the possessive Offred, or "Of Fred.") But the differences from the novel make it much more prescient. Blurring the line between the two realities—one that Atwood envisioned 30 years ago, and the one you're living in right now—creates a dystopia that feels frighteningly adjacent to the viewer's world.

The main plot points of *The Handmaid's Tale *carry over from book to screen: A religious coup has seized control of the US, and women have no rights. The lucky ones serve commanders as wives, cooks, or "handmaids," conscripted to bear children for the barren ruling class; the unlucky ones, known as Unwomen, are shipped off to clean up toxic waste. Offred must reconcile her new life as a walking womb with the family, career, and life taken from her. Beyond that, though the Hulu series veers away from the novel, adding specificity to Offred (played by Elisabeth Moss) and developing independent plot lines around Ofglen (played by Alexis Bledel) and Janine (Madeline Brewer), making it all the more difficult to look away from the world of Gilead.

When read in 2017, the discordant reminders of Offred's old life jolt a reader just as they jolt the protagonist: a familiar brand of dishtowel in the home where she now lives in servitude; the ordinary suits worn by tourists visiting the Republic of Gilead; the wall of a college library, now used to hang "gender traitors" and doctors who perform abortions. A visual medium makes the juxtapositions even more visceral, contrasting handmaids' generic supermarkets with Offred's flashbacks of a world of $4 cappuccinos and couch-hunting on Craigslist. "I wanted it to feel like today for a very coarse, dramatic reason," says showrunner Bruce Miller. "It's scary if it feels real."

And, of course, the story of a male regime controlling women's bodies takes on an additional layer of relevance under the Trump administration. For Miller, who developed the show throughout 2016, the presidential election served as chilling source material—and obscene misogyny provided some vivid inspiration. "A show like this rises and falls on how interesting the bad guys are," he says. "With the rise of the alt-right and some of the things that candidates were saying, there were ideas that I thought people didn’t believe anymore that were being articulated so clearly." For many, the Latin phrase that a previous handmaid scrawled into Offred's wardrobe—"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum," or "Don't let the bastards drag you down"—now seems immediately applicable. As Aunt Lydia (played by Ann Dowd) tells handmaids-in-training, "Ordinary is just what you're used to. This may not seem ordinary to you right now, but after a time it will."

In the decades since Atwood wrote Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin in the 1980s, the book's themes of sexual freedom and women's autonomy have invited adaptation, but allowed for update. It was reimagined in a 1990 movie just after the Berlin Wall came down, and an opera version in 2001 featured a fictional collapse of the Twin Towers (the bit was excised after 9/11). In the novel, the protagonist worked on a college paper about date rape; in the Hulu show, it's about campus sexual assault. “The problems are the same kind of problem, but they've been augmented by technology,” says Atwood, who makes a cameo appearance in the show. Today, taking away women’s independence by seizing control of their digital information has new resonance. "None of that was predictable in 1985," she says, "but the tendency—that you get data through something that people use, such as a credit card—that has just become so much bigger."

The adaptation, which Hulu started to pursue in 2015, is exceptionally well-timed. Atwood's novel has never gone out of print, but as book sales show, dystopian fiction is especially resonant now. "Any dystopia that’s realistically based—that is this planet, not a galaxy far far away in another time—they’re all blueprints," Atwood says. "They’re blueprints that are asking me, reader or viewer, is this where you want to live? And if not, what are the steps that need to be taken to avoid going there?" Viewers won’t want to live in Gilead—but with Handmaid's Tale, they’ll definitely want to watch it.