Giving star ratings to dystopian TV can feel like scoring reality

Trump’s anti-abortion agenda feels like the thin end of a wedge that has its conclusion in the brutal storylines of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

US anti-abortion bills mirror Margaret Atwood’s fictional world (Hulu/Channel 4)

We ran a four-star review of The Handmaid’s Tale this week (episode six, season three). It is alarming how close to reality it is becoming.

As each episode plays out, it strikes me more than ever that Margaret Atwood’s dystopian book, and its TV adaptation, is foreshadowing the coming months and years of Donald Trump’s administration.

In the same week as Elisabeth Moss’s character, June, and the rest of Gilead’s female inhabitants fall victim to more misogynistic horrors – the handmaid’s mouths are now being sewn shut – Trump told four progressive Democratic congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”.

These vile, racist comments – directed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and in particular Ilhan Omar, the only congresswoman in the group not born in US – would seem more believable if they were in a trailer for that show, or maybe the BBC’s own recent dystopian TV series, Years and Years.

The truth is that even though The Handmaid’s Tale continues to cause gasps of disbelief, it is also becoming hard to see how the show can keep pace with the chilling news on our daily bulletins. Only a few months ago, Alabama made abortion a crime; doctors who perform the procedure could face up to 99 years in prison, even if the pregnancy is a result of incest or rape.

Pro-choice supporters dressed like characters from the TV series, in white bonnets and burgundy capes, as they protested in front of the Alabama State House, carrying signs saying “Get out of my uterus”.

This may be the strictest ban of all the US states, but others have passed bills which prohibit abortion after about six weeks, including Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio. Other states are considering or finalising more bans or abortion restrictions.

Trump’s anti-abortion agenda feels like the thin end of a wedge that has its conclusion in the brutal storylines of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Even the author Atwood, who created the world of Gilead, where handmaids are ritually raped in order to bear children for other women, has commented that it is getting hard to separate fact from fiction in her story. In a tweet on the subject, Atwood shared an opinion article about The Handmaid’s Tale coming to life in Alabama.

Of course, she of all people knows that Gilead mirrors America, despite the response of one Twitter user who rather embarrassingly replied to the author: “I think you and I were watching different shows”.

Yours,

Charlotte Cripps​

Arts writer and editor