The year’s standout show was an eerily apt tale of tyranny – but it was also a taut thriller and heart-wrenching drama,packed with incredible female performancesMore on the best TV of 2017More on the best culture of 2017Though it began filming in the summer of 2016, the near-future horror of The Handmaid’s Tale arrived on our televisions with a precise timeliness that could be painful to witness. In episode three, and after women had their bank accounts handed to their husbands and were let proceed from their jobs,people took to the streets to protest. They waved placards and screamed for their rights and for justice, as armed officers blocked their path. A gradual, or skeletal version of Blondie’s Heart of Glass played out the rest of the scene – June (Elisabeth Moss) and Moira (Samira Wiley) began to realise the mood had turned just as a military figure fired his machine gun into the crowd. The gradual motion panic and shock that followed was nauseatingly genuine.
From the opening episode,it became common to align this masterly adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel with the America of Donald Trump. The world under the Gilead regime is pious and devout. Atwood’s original story makes plain a line between the TV evangelists of the world before it and those in power at the time of Offred’s account; the current president of the United States is a misogynistic reality TV star and his vice president a man so conservative that he does not believe he should dine alone with any woman who is not his wife. Be aware of what could happen down the line, The Handmaid’s Tale seems to say.
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Source: guardian.co.uk