One of the best dramas of 2017 slipped onto our screens
almost unnoticed. The internet was abuzz
with teasers and trailers and stills of this long-awaited adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985
novel. The author herself could barely
contain her excitement in her social media feeds, and rightly so. But, I asked myself, what on earth is this Hulu thing it was going to be appearing
on? Did I need another subscription
alongside Amazon
Prime, Netflix and Sky? But
we don’t have it here, so what about people in the UK? How were we going to watch it? This, in itself, was a reminder of how long
we used to have to wait for entertainment to reach our shores from North
America until the internet made most things immediate. At the last minute, Channel 4 acquired the rights and with
little ado, the show made its Sunday evening debut.
I’ve talked before of that final hour of Sunday being a key
slot for comfort programming: nostalgic period pieces
or luscious footage of natural history. Snuggled on sofas, we’re at our most
vulnerable and will do anything to soften the blow of Monday morning. The
Handmaid’s Tale was having none of it.
Every harrowing moment brought the crushing reality of how awful life
can be straight to every Sunday evening viewer.
Suddenly, the TV boxset was a terrifying place.
Atwood has pointed out that there is nothing in The Handmaid’s
Tale that isn’t already happening somewhere in the world. When I first read the novel, it was the very
feasibility of Gilead, a religious-fundamentalist state where parts of the USA
used to be, that chilled me the most. I couldn’t
shake the concept. In it, women are
objects to be possessed in service to men.
The entire system is based on faith.
It’s over thirty-two years since publication (and twenty-seven years
since a 1990 feature film
adaptation where everyone’s hair was too big) and faith still abounds in the
modern world as a tool to excuse all sorts of reprehensible behaviour. If enough people believe something, then it
must be right, right?
I’ve managed to get to the fourth paragraph without saying
dystopian, but it’s the essential descriptor here: in this dystopian vision of
the future, (wo)mankind’s fertility is running out. Handmaids, as the last remaining group that
can bear children, are envied by barren women and punished for their fecundity
by both genders. Love doesn’t come into
it, as they are assigned to wealthy and powerful childless couples, solely for
the purpose of conceiving, birthing and giving away their progeny in a series
of ceremonies that display inconceivable brutality. Yet, in real life, inconceivable acts are
justified by faith every day. So far, so
hauntingly realistic.
Our focus is Offred/June, a Handmaid who cannot reconcile
her role in Gilead’s society with the life she had before. The drama is deftly woven with flashbacks to
the breakdown of America, the somehow plausible emergence of Gilead through a
gradual erosion of women’s rights. Nothing
is ever explained properly. Instead, we
are granted the credit to piece together this society and culture from the
evidence presented. As such, we share
June’s horror as she peels back layer after layer of cruelty. It is Elisabeth Moss’s
outstanding performance that heightens not just the credibility of each scene,
but the acute suffering June must go through as she becomes Offred. Yet, she never lets us in that far. We must guess her next move as much as any
other character must, which prevents The Handmaid’s Tale, thankfully, from ever
descending into mundane predictability.
The supporting cast is studded with further quality. Yvonne Strahovski
plays the wife to whose family Offred is assigned and bristles with the
internal conflict her Handmaid’s role causes her. The other Handmaids each invite untold
curiosity: cruelty begets cruelty. In
addition, Amanda Brugel
as the household’s Martha (multipurpose maid, also barren) positively seethes
with quiet dignity. So, not only is the
concept utterly gripping, its execution is almost faultless. My only niggle is that a lot of bumping into
each other takes place in Gilead, as if there is only one shop or something,
but I will honestly forgive this programme anything.
The medium of a ten-part series has allowed the show’s
makers to mine the book’s material in order to expand and enrich the universe
Atwood first created. Carefully teased
into tense drama that hooks a viewer within minutes only never to let them go
(a housemate got totally sucked into the sixth episode after walking into the
room ten minutes in), Channel 4 had an absolute touch sneaking this into their
schedule. And it turned out to be one of
their highest rating shows of the year.
The teasing out has paid off as a second season is in the works, so I
can only beg as many people as possible to make sure they have seen the first
ten episodes before more are unleashed on us.
This show and what it has to tell us cannot go unnoticed.
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