Finally Watching "The Handmaid's Tale" on Hulu

Last night, I started watching the recent adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu.  I had planned to watch it when it first came out, but I didn't have Hulu then.  I decided to wait until I could watch the whole season, but by then I knew there would be more seasons, and I just felt overwhelmed.

A few years have gone by, and we now have a smart TV and Hulu.  Most nights, we still can't find much that we want to watch, which makes me sad since we have access to so much.  I've decided that it's time to start delving into quality stuff of the not-too-distant past.

I've been a bit leery of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, for fear of the violence and the rapiness of the later seasons.  But I decided I could watch the first few episodes, so last night we watched two of them.  I think we'll watch more.  I'm impressed with how well done it is--and how many episodes of Hell's Kitchen do I really want to waste time on?

Readers of this blog know that I've been a fan of this book since it first came out.  I read it and told everyone that they must read this book.  I read it multiple times, and it holds up well through the decades.   I saw the movie adaptation in the 90's, and I thought it was fine--not wonderful enough to watch it more than once, but fine. I feel the power of the book, even as I admit that there are other Atwood books that feel more compelling to me.

Throughout much of the Trump years, I have been almost afraid to return to the novels that predicted our predicament, novels like The Handmaid's Tale and Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler.  But as I did, I realized that the Trump administration was nothing like the governments of most dystopian novels or of the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century, like those of Hitler or Stalin.  

Trump never had enough focus or organization or ability to plan to be able to create the kind of dystopia that Atwood presents.  We were lucky this time.  I continue to be haunted by Atwood's assertion that she didn't include any elements in The Handmaid's Tale that weren't happening in the world in 1984 or didn't have an actual happening in history.

As the Trump administration progressed, there was part of me that didn't want to watch The Handmaid's Tale for fear it would feel too real and out of a sort of weariness of feeling like I was watching something similar each time I watched the news.  There was a moment in the early part of the first episode when the child is ripped out of the arms of the woman where my alarmed brain said, "No!  Too soon, too soon!"

I'm glad I kept watching.  We'll be watching more episodes this week-end.