Trying to figure out the appeal of The Handmaid’s Tale is a difficult one. It might be the political climate in the country, of course, but The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t a very good show despite having an interesting setup.
We’re at some point in the future and the United States is now a religious dictatorship, where some women are set up as breeding stock to help resupply the world with people after the apocalypse.
We follow Offred (Elizabeth Moss), a handmaid in this future world, as she navigates through this world. And if a regular television show has a brisk walking pace, this one takes a step every couple of hours and calls it a sprint.
That’s the main problem with this first season; it’s first three episodes take so long to world build that you’d expect a significantly long first season. At 10 episodes a third of the running time is devoted to just explaining what’s happening and the final third of the season is almost exclusively in flashback, to set up the four episodes in between that have any reasonable pace.
In any other era of television this would be a blink and you won’t miss it show; in the era of Trump people will assign whatever political leanings they have to it in a quasi-virtue signal. Don’t mistake others political yearnings through the shoe with genuine analysis; it’s about as enlightening on the modern political era as Game of Thrones would be as a proxy to the politics of the Middle Ages.
Nothing of substance.
MGM presents The Handmaid’s Tale. Starring Elizabeth Moss, Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Alexis Biedel. Run Time: 525 minutes. Not Rated. Released on: 3.13.18
