THE HANDMAID'S TALE
REVOLUTION ROAD
THE SHOW RUNNERS OF THE H ANDM AID’S TALE DISCUSS HOW THEY’VE TURNED MARGARET ATWOOD’S CLASSIC BOOK INTO A R ALLYING CALL FOR OUR TIMES
WORDS: TARA BENNETT
AH, WHAT A STRANGE JOURNEY Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction classic The Handmaid’s Tale has taken since it was first published in 1985. A satire of the religious right policies fomented during President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the United States, Atwood’s narrative was the ultimate “What if?” thought experiment about what the country might look like if those policies incited a hostile takeover of democracy and the US became a totalitarian patriarchy called Gilead. Sobering, but surely impossible… (Insert nervous laugh).
Fast-forward to 2016 when Bruce Miller (The 4400) and executive producer Warren Littlefield (Fargo) were given a straight-toseries order for The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne/Offred, for Hulu. That was just seven months before Donald Trump and his ultra-right wing Republican party won the election for the White House… (Now insert slightly more hysterical laugh).
During that four-year term, the series and its stark portrayal of the roadmap to the Gilead government became a lightning rod for women and civil liberty advocates, with their protests often featuring women wearing the red handmaid uniforms seen in the series.
Life continues to imitate art as The Handmaid’s Tale returns this month for its sixth and final season, a little over two months into the second Trump presidential regime, which seemingly used Gilead as a partial primer for their Project 2025 policies… (No laughter to be found).