On Tuesday, May 27, 2025, with the tenth episode of the sixth season, the series ended “The Handmaid's Tale”: 8 years, 6 seasons, 66 episodes and almost 4.000 minutes of viewing for the television adaptation written by Bruce Miller. Based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood, the series is produced by MGM and Hulu. The writer has served as a production consultant, alongside the creative team since 2017.
In an interview with NYTimes In 2019, Atwood clarified that she had “influence but not the power to have the final say, like, ‘You can’t have that person killed’” (referring to Aunt Lydia).
And in fact it didn't happen, so much so that Aunt Lydia will be one of the protagonists of the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments. Filming for the new series began in Toronto on April 7, 2025. Also based on Atwood's 2019 novel of the same name, the series could air in 2026, although Hulu has not yet announced an official release date. Let's hope we don't have to suffer as much in this sequel as we did in the 65 hours of viewing required by The Handmaid's Tale: seeing, after all, hurts more than reading. May we be granted a little respite. “Blessed be the fruit.”
Gilead
Gilead, androcratic theocracy e dystopia born from real problems of contemporaneity, shakes our faith in the principle that everything real is necessarily rational. The experience of Gilead hypnotizes us, pushing us toward the philosophy of suffering, along the lines of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Then we wake up: Gilead does not exist! It is only fiction, born from the fertile mind of Margaret Atwood. Praise be!
Alex DeLarge
Many will remember the final scenes of Clockwork Orange. Alex DeLarge, the Ludvig Van and Bible-loving hooligan, is chosen for a government rehabilitation program. One of the “therapies” involves him immobilizing himself in a chair: his eyes held open by clamps so he can watch hours and hours of violent and degrading videos, without a break and without the possibility of looking away.
The treatment seems effective: reintegrated into society, Alex can no longer act with violence, he endures everything with nausea and resignation. He is empty, unable to defend himself, deprived of will and apparently docile.
I'm not saying the same thing happens with the serial viewing of "The Handmaid's Tale", but that endless chain of oppression, abuse and cruelty generates suffering. Watching it becomes a nightmare, an experience at the limit of tolerable.
It’s a “hellhole,” says one critic. Another: “relentlessly dark.” And a third: “soul-draining suffering. Pure despair.” Not even the tenth episode of the sixth season, which definitively closes the series, offers any comfort.. June bids farewell to Mark Tuello (Sam Jaeger), a representative of the American government in exile and a CIA officer. As she bids him farewell, June calls him “Captain Tuello,” and he corrects her: “Commander, actually.” The detail is significant: Gilead’s leaders also bore that title. Has totalitarian culture infiltrated everywhere, even among those fighting for freedom?
Fiction and reality
It is not alone The Handmaid to immerse the audience in Alex's condition. It also happened to me with “Melancholia” by von Trier, “The Whale” by Aronofsky, “Zone of Interest” and “The Turin Horse”, the slow and apocalyptic film by Béla Tarr. This ability to absorb people and incorporate them into fiction is not a defect, but a extraordinary narrative ability that erases the boundary between reality and story enough to leave a real and lasting emotional aftermath. My mother did not tolerate even the slightest bit of suffering or violence in films: only comedies and musicals. For her, everything was real: the fake tomato, the glycerine tears, the papier-mâché bonfires, the blank shots, the pulp.
Perhaps that refusal was born from the trauma of childhood: the bombings, the grenades, the requisitions, the roar of the planes, the taking refuge in the ditches. A sedimented pain that cinema should not have reawakened. With “The Handmaid's Tale”, especially if consumed in reel, suffering becomes extreme, similar to that suffered in a 250-kilometer marathon in the rainforest, with 99% humidity and three rivers to cross.
A forced extension
Atwood's novel worked because of its density and compactness. Expanding it into sixty-five hours has thinned out its intensity, weakening the force with which the central theme reached the viewer. A notable limitation of the series is precisely having prolonged the story beyond measure. Having concluded the plot of the novel in the first season, the screenwriters found themselves having to continue without a solid literary reference. Keeping the tension high and the plot engaging has become increasingly difficult.. June (Elisabeth Moss) had to guide a narrative that erratically searched for a new center and a credible direction.
The character was trapped in a narrative circularity: capture, escape, return. This circularity wore down the structure of the story, undermining the verisimilitude and emotional resistance of the audience.
The challenge to the public
As the editorialist of the asks himselfEconomist, to what extent can a television series, even one acclaimed and supported by an effective metaphor, go in testing the emotional resistance of those who are enjoying it?
Television series, unlike cinema, require a long-term commitment.. Without pauses, without glimmers of hope, even the most successful dystopia risks turning into a sort of narrative sadism.
There is a physiological limit to the amount of induced suffering that the public can tolerate. It is a reminder: the project must find a balance between relevance and entertainment, as melodrama did. When “relevance” becomes the only criterion of value, we risk creating works that age badly, tire, lose audiences and miss the goal: to leave an authentic and lasting mark over time.
Political timing
With this, the handmaid left her mark. Released in 2017, the series became a political manifesto against the alt-right and religious fundamentalism, standing as a manifesto of cultural and ideological opposition. Many saw the oppression of women and the authoritarian drift of Gilead's society not as an act of fiction, but as a disturbing outcome of certain cultures that had become mainstream.
In a 2017 speech, Atwood explained that the novel, authentically feminist, was born from real events. Gilead is based on the Puritan legacy of the seventeenth century, rooted in the culture of deepest America. The plot is inspired by concrete historical facts: public executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Nazi Lebensborn program, the theft of children in Argentina, slavery and polygamy in American history. In 2017, the series based on the book touched a raw nerve in American society. The perfect timing favored critical recognition and decreed an immediate and strong public success.
The awards
It was the first streaming series to win theEmmy for Outstanding Drama Series, winning seven other awards, including for Elisabeth Moss (June/Offred) and Ann Dowd (Aunt Lydia). The novel has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide, with over 3 million purchased after the 2016 US presidential election, when interest in the dystopia of Gilead exploded. The ninth episode of the sixth season, broadcast on May 20, 2025, opens with “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor's Version)” by global pop sensation Taylor Swift. The re-recorded version of the 2017 song accompanies the scene in which June Osborne leads a rebellion against Gilead's commanders: a clear symbolic endorsement of the female fight against oppression.
Gilead has not come and will not come
One reviewer reported having a panic attack after watching it. For those who fear for American democracy, “The Handmaid’s Tale” offers no escape, only suffering and dark foreboding.
As CS Lewis writes in A Grief Observed (Chronicles of Narnia), suffering resembles fear. And in 2017, that fear had a precise name: Gilead, symbol of an upcoming Ventura authoritarian drift.
Then the Republic of Gilead didn’t come and probably never will. The series has lost the political relevance of its message, slowly sliding towards the decline of “The Walking Dead”, whose parable resembles it. We await with interest the adaptation of “The Testaments”, the sequel. As “The Economist” notes, watching the victims of a totalitarian regime is depressing, but witnessing its fall is gripping.
Let there be praise!
I forgot! Margaret Atwood is a Canadian from Ottawa. In the continent dominated by Gilead, the Canada represents a territory free and democratic, outside the theocratic control of Gilead-ized America. “In Canada they let you drive. They let you study. You can talk. Even write.” Moira tells June/Offred in the secret brothel of Jezebel in Gilead, recounting her failed escape and her now-faded hope of ever reaching Canada. (In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Jezebel,” Season 1, Episode 8)
