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’

Charlotte Cripps
Saturday 20 July 2019 02:30 BST
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US anti-abortion bills mirror Margaret Atwood’s fictional world
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”.

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