A Handmaid's Tale (season one)

There's a great movie or 3-4 hour mini-series in the first season of A Handmaid's Tale. Unfortunately it's spread out over about 10 hours of excruciating repetition.

The series takes place in an alternate timeline where world-wide fertility rates have been falling for many years, and finally reached crisis levels in the present day. A group calling itself the Sons of Jacob takes over the continental United States and turns it into a military state called Gilead, where women have no rights except through their male relatives. Fertile women are singled out and made into "handmaids" who are assigned to Gilead leaders to bear their children.

The story follows a woman named June who attempts to escape to Canada with her husband and daughter, but fails and is captured. Her daughter is taken away and June is assigned to Gilead Commander Waterford as a handmaid named Offred. The series splits time following June and the other handmaids in their lives in Boston, and flashing back to how things changed from the world we know to this dystopia.

I enjoyed the first couple of episodes of A Handmaid's Tale. It takes some time to figure out the world that they've built, and for June's terrible situation to really sink in. But then it's pretty much just more of the same. Hours of filling in details about the past which were already implied by prior flashbacks, conflicts between June and Mrs. Waterford, handmaids attempting rebellion and being caught, and so on. You might get 5-10 minutes of actual new information in each episode. The rest is largely just emotional manipulation...sex, oppression, fear, and occasional glimpses of kindness...so the viewer feels like something is happening when it's really just the same stuff over and over. We got all that already, thanks, it's not necessary to beat us over the head with it.

Oh, there are twists, but they're incredibly obvious. I suppose this is technically spoiler territory, but was anyone really surprised that June ends up sleeping with the household driver? Or that one of the handmaids, after giving birth in her assigned household, goes crazy when they take her away to a different household? Or that her husband who was conveniently off-screen when June heard shots that "killed" him turns out to be alive in Canada?

I suspect a lot of the reason that A Handmaid's Tale was received so well is the social commentary. The entire premise is based on misogyny and the twisting of religion to justify it. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to draw a line from the present day to the events in the alternate timeline shown in the series. But to my mind, the fact that the series says some good things doesn't excuse the fact that it gets repetitive and boring.

There's a second season of A Handmaid's Tale being released gradually on Hulu, but I can't say I'm particularly enthusiastic about it. Maybe someday I'll consider finishing it, but I suspect I'll end up just reading the summaries and saving myself a few hours.