Why audiences have turned tail on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ | Arts & Entertainment

There was a time when “The Handmaid’s Tale” was the biggest (cultural) thing on the planet. And it was a popularity fueled by fear and dread. 

Imagine, if you even possibly could, a time in the near-distant past – let’s say April 2017, when Hulu dropped the first season on an unsuspecting public. It’s three months into the most unlikely and destabilizing presidency in our nation’s history. A political rogue few seriously thought would actually ascend to the presidency was promising to pack the courts and put an end to women’s reproductive rights. He threatened economic isolation even from our allies and promised to build a wall to keep undesirables out. Despite his own immense personal moral failings, he galvanized an evangelical base hungry for a full, faith-based reckoning.   

What’s that? Not that hard to imagine? Perhaps because, here we are again in April 2025, three months into what is now the most unlikely and destabilizing presidency in our nation’s history. In a moment dripping with calendrical irony, Hulu has just begun the sixth and final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” – nearly eight years to the day since its premiere.

Only, record scratch: No one seems to be watching. Worse, from a zeitgeist barometer: No one is even talking about it. Talk about irony: One of the most divisive cultural polemics in television history is ending, and all sides now seem to be united in their disinterest.

How is that even possible?

A show like no other

When Hulu dropped its harrowing dramatization of Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s dystopian, near-future novel, it went off like a (cultural) bomb. It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact it had on people’s psyches – and on the national discourse – when it first came out. No matter your political persuasion, if you watched this show, you were triggered by it.

For those of us on the wrong side of the 2016 presidential election, the series manifested our darkest fears by presenting a frighteningly conceivable version of our nascent reality taken to its most hellish natural conclusion.

Atwood’s bleak cautionary tale, published all the way back in 1985, presented a patriarchal, totalitarian Christian state known as the Republic of Gilead. Its leaders have overthrown a corrupt U.S. government whose many sins included the desecration of the environment and an obliviousness to climate change that has caused a global infertility crisis.

The succeeding government has used its paramilitary forces to create a new ruling class that, among many other human-rights atrocities, has outlawed all women from earning money or owning property, kidnapped children for reassignment with conforming families, and enslaved fertile women as “handmaids” to be raped and impregnated to increase the population.

The story revolves around one of the greatest unintended antiheroes in TV history: June Osborne, preternaturally portrayed by Elisabeth Moss, was an ordinary book editor with a husband and daughter at the time of the coup. But because divorce is now retroactively outlawed and June’s husband was previously married, June is labeled an adulterer, captured, reassigned a Pilgrim name (Offred), and assigned to a Commander’s house of horrors for the purpose of bearing him children. For eight years, the audience has suffered with June through unimaginable abuses and larger-than-life acts of heroism.

Showrunner Bruce Miller’s relentless, graphic depictions of violence are meant to illustrate the actual exploitation and oppression of women in our real world. Legend has it every example of abuse in the show is based on an actual documented incident somewhere in the world. That effectively propelled the narrative that the idea of a Gilead was not as far-flung as one might want to believe. Detractors have called the show exploitative, but its fans posit that it is an effective amplification of Atwood’s warning about the dangers of full patriarchal control.

Americans were glued to their TV sets to watch a story that showed with harrowing clarity their darkest fears come true. It was bleak, but it was bold. And it accomplished what the best American pop culture does: It amplified a necessary and relevant discourse, this one on gender equity.

Whether you loved it or hated it, there was no questioning the show’s impact. “The Handmaid’s Tale” hauled in eight Emmy Awards in its first season, including best drama. By Season 4, it was the most-watched show in Hulu history. Propelled, no doubt, by those so addicted to the stomach-churning story that they simply could not look away.

People started cleverly exchanging coded greetings like, “Under his eye,” and “May the Lord open,” as coded ways of telling each other, “We are so effed.” In the words of TV critic Ariana Romero, “‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ created the kind of anxiety that chilled you to your core, but kept you clicking ‘Next episode.’”

I was on board from Episode 1. But Season 2, Episode 2, wrecked me in a way that perhaps nothing has since I first saw Nick point a gun to his head and fire in “The Deer Hunter.”

In one of the show’s least-subtle scenes, a newly escaped June has found her way to the abandoned offices of the Boston Globe, where we learn that the staff were rounded up and hung or shot to death in the basement. June grabs a box, goes from desk to desk picking up various personal items, and holds a candlelight vigil for the murdered journalists.

I was reminded of the famous Holocaust poem that is now often repurposed as threats to free speech have escalated: “First they came for the journalists. … We don’t know what happened after that.”

What went wrong?

“The Handmaid’s Tale’ has secured a permanent place in pop-culture history, of that there is no doubt. And yet, its May 27 final episode is shaping up to be an astonishing non-event. All the more surprising given that Season 6 is the payoff for all the suffering that June and her audience have endured. The final chapter, its creators have promised, “highlights the importance of hope, courage, solidarity, and resilience in the pursuit of justice and freedom.”

So why is no one watching?

Partly because of the momentum-killing, three-year gap between Seasons 5 and 6 (a delay that, it should be noted, did not negatively impact the recent return of “Severance”). Partly fatigue. Partly repetition. Partly full surrender, given the resurgence and proliferation of the Trump ideology. And yes, partly because, in Season 6, the storytelling has grown listless and predictable in comparison to everything that has come before.

I asked readers why they think “The Handmaid’s Tale” is ending with something of a sigh, and the prevailing opinion was largely the same: You can’t be all that afraid of being confronted by what might happen, when it’s happening right in front of you.

The series, said Sean Kennedy of Aurora: “depicts a dystopian world that in its final season is quickly closing the gap toward mirroring our own.”

 Maybe that’s why the return of the similarly dystopian Max series “The Last of Us” is generating far more buzz than “The Handmaid’s Tale” at the moment. In that world, a pandemic (also brought on by climate change), has unleashed a mass fungal infection that turns people into zombie-like creatures and causes the collapse of society. That apocalypse feels a little further off into the future enough to still be enjoyable to watch.

But reader Carla Kaiser Kotrc is still “absolutely” watching the story play out, staggered by its cumulative impact. “It is so mirroring what is happening  – and could easily happen – to our country, that it is frightening,” she said. “Gilead started out in the same horrifying way our country is headed now.”

But not even the show’s target audience will be watching the story’s climax en masse.

“I couldn’t bring myself to keep watching after the first season,” said Kristianne Seaton. “It’s a great show, but it is too hard to watch. It’s too close to what’s happening. I will watch someday, but not until this regime is no more.”

When “The Handmaid’s Tale” debuted in 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum commented on what she called then its “grotesque timeliness.” But it was also, added IndieWire critic Ben Travers, an accidental timeliness.

Atwood may have seen this coming 40 years ago, but the TV show was in the works long before the emergence of Trump in 2016. Which, if we’re being honest, was the best thing that could have happened to the newborn TV show, and its marketing.

In the book, Travers notes, Offred is not a warrior; she is a witness. She’s chronicling her experience as a way of preserving her sanity. But in the TV show, she’s fighting back. “Instead of acting as a passive participant in history, she’s changing history,” he wrote. “Making June a heroine put the TV show on – as Nussbaum feared – a predictable progression. First, she would survive Gilead. Then, she would escape Gilead. Then, she would defeat Gilead. And when Gilead represents American misogyny, that’s a tall order when it comes to reflecting the real world.”

And now that we are poised to see what promises to be June’s long-awaited triumph, the show is starting to feel like a traditionally entertaining – and therefore predictable – underdog story. That’s certainly what we need to see to close the book on this whole saga – the impending comeuppance of that creepy guy from “Veep” (Timothy Simons) and all his Commander kind. That is both our reward – and our therapy – for having endured years of relentless atrocities against these women.

But how satisfying will that be, really, when – in another case of “grotesque timeliness” – we all know that the latest real-life administration is just getting started.

It’s been an emotionally exhausting ride. But its lasting message – and its cultural legacy – will be its essential reminder of the importance of fighting back in any way you can.