The Handmaid’s Tale: Catch up on all the trailers, updates, and commentary for Hulu’s dystopian show – The Verge

Hulu renewed The Handmaid’s Tale for a fourth season

2019-07-26T15:20:59-04:00

Hulu isn't ready to leave the Republic of Gilead just yet. Today, at its Television Critics Association presentation, it announced that it has renewed The Handmaid's Tale for a fourth season.

Based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name, it's set in a world where the United States has fallen into a theocracy where women are stripped of their rights and forced into sexual slavery. The series is almost done with its third season, and in the last two seasons, it's moved further away from the original novel. Hulu didn't say when the new season would debut.

The show's first and second seasons attracted some criticism that it was overw …

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Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale is a model of longform worldbuilding

2019-07-15T12:51:16-04:00

Sometimes, discovering a new fictional world is like forming a crush on a relative stranger. It's easy to get swept up in the excitement for something fresh and unique. In fiction, that can mean discovering a new universe that feels revelatory. But often, the more you learn about that world, the less it holds up, and the less time you want to spend with it. Reading the next book in the series, or watching another episode, you become disappointed, because this shiny new world doesn't make nearly as much sense once the details are filled in.

The secret comes down to ensuring that each new detail introduced, each new development, not only make …

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Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale finally prioritizes revolution over suffering

2019-06-04T13:45:42-04:00

In "Night," the first episode of season 3 of Hulu's dystopian drama The Handmaid's Tale, the house where much of the first two seasons took place burns to the ground. The camera pans between the small room where handmaid June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) was imprisoned, the study where she bonded with her captor, Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), over tense games of Scrabble, and the master bedroom where he repeatedly raped June with the goal of producing a baby that his wife, Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), could claim as her own. As the flames consume each set, the metaphor is clear, if not exactly subtle. This part of the story is over. …

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In The Handmaid’s Tale season 3 trailer, revolution comes to Gilead

2019-05-01T12:33:33-04:00

Hulu has unveiled a new look at the upcoming third season of its dystopian series The Handmaid's Tale, showing off the birth of a resistance movement.

This new trailer opens with Offred (Elizabeth Moss) highlighting some of the changes that have come to the world. She opted not to leave Gilead during the show's second season, and it seems she's now hard at work formulating a revolution against her oppressors and hunting for allies to help her.

We got our first look at season 3 back in February during the Super Bowl when Hulu parodied President Ronald Reagan's iconic 1984 Morning in America commercial, juxtaposing the utopian vision present …

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Is The Handmaid’s Tale still worth the agony of watching it?

2018-04-27T06:00:02-04:00

Hulu's original series The Handmaid's Tale is back for season 2, looking bloodier and more harrowing than ever. The series, based on Margaret Atwood's freshly relevant 1985 novel, is set in a near-future dystopian country named Gilead, where widespread infertility has changed the political and social landscape. Fertile women are a commodity - dubbed "Handmaids," and passed out like property to powerful families to be ritualistically raped and used as surrogate mothers. The entire society of Gilead seems to be built around propaganda and social control. Like so much science fiction, it's meant to explore the possible end results of present de …

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The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite get modern American misogyny

2018-04-26T11:34:17-04:00

The Handmaid's Tale is a difficult show to appreciate right now. After following the plot of Margaret Atwood's 1985 book in its first season, its second season piles on a series of additional horrors, all set in the future nation of Gilead - a religious theocracy that kills and tortures women who refuse to submit to male ownership. As my colleague Laura Hudson writes, "its portents are so terrifyingly familiar that they have become excruciating to watch."

The Handmaid's Tale's premise - that you can't permanently stamp out sexism, just send it more or less into remission - is perpetually timely, as is Gilead's basic disregard for women's b …

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Watch a new teaser for the next season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale

2018-03-08T13:19:39-05:00

Hulu has released a new teaser for the next season of its dystopian show, The Handmaid's Tale, listing off all of the things that that the Handmaids have to contend with in their day-to-day lives in the oppressive country of Gilead.

The list essentially boils down to obeying and submitting to men: "wear the red dress, wear the wings, shut your mouth, be a good girl." It feels entirely appropriate for the teaser to land today, on International Women's Day: a pointed reminder of the systemic inequality that exists today, and which is depicted at its extremes in the show.

Based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, the show is set in a near-future …

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Watch the first trailer for the next season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale

2018-01-14T13:50:57-05:00

Hulu has released its first trailer for its upcoming second season of The Handmaid's Tale, revealing that the show will return on April 25th, and that we'll see a bit more of the world beyond the oppressive world of Gilead.

When the show ended its first season last year, its main character, Offred, was captured by authorities, while her friend Moira escaped into Canada. Set to a creepy cover of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth", the trailer shows the characters dealing with their predicaments. We see Offred gagged by officials, Moria in Canada, and what looks like the feared colonies - contaminated and polluted regions of the form …

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Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale wins the 2018 Golden Globe for Best Drama TV Series

2018-01-07T21:08:17-05:00

Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale has won the 2018 Golden Globe for Best TV Series in the Drama category. The series, based on Margaret Atwood's novel, was up against The Crown, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and This is Us.

Series creator Bruce Miller accepted the award, saying, "To all the people in the world who stopped The Handmaid's Tale from coming real: keep doing that."

Elizabeth Moss, who plays Offred in The Handmaid's Tale, also won a Golden Globe tonight for her role in the series. Ann Dowd is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Aunt Lydia.

The Handmaid's Tale has already distinguished itself in the past year as a …

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Elisabeth Moss wins the 2018 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Drama

2018-01-07T20:48:19-05:00

Elisabeth Moss won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Drama tonight, for her performance as Offred in Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale. The series is also up for Best Drama, and Ann Dowd is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Aunt Lydia.

Moss also won the Emmy for her role in September, and has been nominated for a Golden Globe twice before for her work on AMC's Mad Men. Accepting the award, she read a statement from The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood that related the show - a near-future dystopian political drama about an America in which women have no rights, and exist only to reproduce - to the current crisis p …

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