Dystopian sci-fi series The Handmaid's Tale returns in a month for its second season, promising more "gut-wrenching" television as it moves beyond the events of Margaret Atwood's foundational feminist novel. The producers of the awards juggernaut, which became Hulu's flagship show last year, are promising new locations, characters and plot twists -- but the same old dread that permeates the nightmarish hellscape of Gilead.
"I have been saying about the opening scene of season two that, whatever you think it's going to be, just throw it out," the show's award-winning star Elisabeth Moss told US cable network Bravo ahead of its April 25 release. "It's gone in a completely different way that I never would have expected," she added.
Published in 1985, Atwood's bestseller is required reading in schools, often mentioned in the same breath as George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and other works of speculative fiction. It has spawned a movie, a graphic novel, an opera and a ballet, not to mention the first season of Hulu's hit show that has eight Emmys, three Critics Choice Awards and two Golden Globes.
The series stars Moss (Mad Men) in a near-future in which New England has been dismantled in a theocratic coup and replaced with Gilead, a tyrannical regime where men mete out brutal punishments and rape is mandated by the state. Moss plays June/Offred, one of the few remaining fertile women who work as "handmaids," given new names to reflect their "owners" and forced into sexual servitude in an attempt to repopulate the climate-ravaged world.
Comments
0 comment