Hulu's new series The Handmaid's Tale, which premiered Wednesday, tells the story of a future United States, called Gilead, in which women are forced to give up their rights to work, own property, and control their bodies following the slow adoption of a totalitarian government. It's based on the 1985 dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, but co-star Samira Wiley tells CNN it's "scarily relevant right now," and she's not alone in voicing that sentiment. Some reactions to that idea and the series overall:
- Atwood herself amplifies the point to the Los Angeles Times, saying that the cast woke up on the morning after Donald Trump's election "and thought, we're no longer making fiction—we're making a documentary."
- Oh, come on, writes Heather Wilhelm at the National Review. She says she must have missed "the brutal rise of a women-enslaving dystopia" in modern America and accuses feminists of hypocrisy on that front. For all "their talk about women needing to 'control their own bodies,' feminists often act as if women are helpless and completely incapable of doing so on their own."
- At Bloomberg, Megan McArdle also thinks the Trump comparisons are "nonsense." She reread the novel amid the hullabaloo and concludes that while there's "nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page," there is "something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality."
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