‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,' Oscar Wilde posited in his seminal 1891 essay The Decay of Lying, acknowledging the imbalance of symbiosis between fiction and reality. The membrane between the two is famously thin, after all.
It would take almost 130 years before Wilde’s thesis would be concisely proved with the 2017 premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale, which aired the same year that the #MeToo movement once again began gaining momentum. It also happened to be the same year that Donald Trump was first elected as President of the United States. The show, with its signature dystopian darkness, became an almost-instant hit, and more series were swiftly written, filmed and released. Each was darker than its predecessor. The sixth, and final, season of the show is now back — the first episode of which is now available to watch on Channel 4 — yet with a creeping tide of authoritarianism around the world, a sweeping regression of women’s rights, and a gentle thrumming of political repression already tearing the world apart at its seams, does anybody really need to watch what is a petrifying reality for many be fictionalised and billed as entertainment?
Margaret Atwood’s seminal 1985 novel that inspired the series eerily foreshadowed much of the tumult that has unfolded in the world today. The TV series, which premiered in 2017, drew inspiration from Atwood’s story but creators of the show extended the novel past its intended lifecycle to create the premise for the series; the result made for a truly gruesome watch, one that I had to turn away from after the first season and won't be turning back to now that it's returned. The question that whirled around my head then, and continues to now, is 'How was torturing women ever considered entertainment in the first place?' Why is a show that normalises the abhorrent mistreatment of women still so celebrated?
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The world has felt like a dark, sad place for women of late. Our bodies, our rights and our words are up for dissection at the whim of powerful men who have felt emasculated after being caught in the cultural crosshairs that were spurred by the #MeToo movement. The real world has always been complicated and convoluted enough without having to watch those very same complications and convolutions unfurl fictionally before our very eyes. Entertainment’s purpose has, on the whole, been to do just that: entertain, yet with The Handmaid's Tale, the show's storylines plunge deeper because they remind us of what's very real for women the world over. The show, upon its 2017 premiere, was a warning of what's to come. Now, it's a clarion call for what has happened and what could — and very well might — happen imminently all around us. For those already engaged with the gender biases, regression of reproductive rights and loss of female autonomy of the world, The Handmaid's Tale is simply too close to the bone.
The first episode of season six keeps the story trapped in the same self-fulfilling loop it's been caged in throughout the previous seasons. We find June (Elisabeth Moss) on a train transporting refugees out of an increasingly hostile Canada to one of the last remaining safe spaces in the United States. Wanting to rebuild and re-establish its relations with its authoritarian neighbour, Canada has started to capitulate to Gilead. It's pertinent to add that at a time of mass deportation at the hands of the Trump administration, The Handmaid's Tale season six premiered in the US during the President's first 100 days in office, creating an eery foreshadowing.
I'm not the only one refusing to watch the show anymore. 'At the end of season two when June chooses not to leave the van escaping Gilead – the one we’ve sat on the edge of our seats throughout the final episode waiting for her to reach – I felt something inside me die,' says ELLE UK's Senior Fashion and Beauty E-commerce Editor, Abigail Southan. 'How could I keep being invested in a show that was more concerned with money-making renewals than the art of good plotting? When I tuned in for season three months later, I felt the show had changed irrevocably. It was high-octane and Harry Potter-like with its fantasy-inspired special effects. It had lost some of its rawness because the big budget was shining through. I didn't follow The Handmaid’s Tale again and don't have plans to.'
ELLE UK's Digital Director Rhiannon Evans agrees that season three marked the turning point for her commitment to the show, too. 'The start of series three and the first few episodes were unrelentingly grim,' she says. 'While Atwood has been vocal about the book (which season one was based on) being heavily inspired by real world things that were happening to women, when they moved past that original source material, it started to feel like a conscious decision had been made to punish June again and again unnecessarily. So I voted with my remote and switched off. From the trailers and coverage I've seen of other seasons, it does seem like the arc moved eventually, so maybe I'll go back one day. But with the real world already saturated with women being punished at the hands of men, I'm not in a rush.'
Despite its uncomfortable subject matter, the show's last series still resonated with viewers. The fifth season averaged 581 million viewers worldwide in the first week of its release in 2022, and, according to Parrot Analytics, audience demand for The Handmaid's Tale is 38.6 times the demand of the average TV series in the United States in the last 30 days alone. The first episode of the sixth season might have only just aired in the UK, but at the time of writing, it has a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. On the whole, audiences do clearly want to watch women lose their bodily autonomy and reproductive rights on the small screen. The real question, though, is why they need to watch a fictionalised version of it, when they can just watch it happen all around them in real time?
The Handmaid’s Tale is on Prime Video and Channel 4 in the UK, on SBS and SBS on Demand in Australia and Hulu in the US.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
