TV Thoughts: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments premiered on Hulu this month and I have been sitting with it since it dropped.

I read the book the week before and what drew me in was the thing Margaret Atwood does that the original Handmaid’s Tale does not quite do the same way: she lets you inside the machinery. The first generation of young women who grew up entirely inside Gilead, who have never known anything else, who are being shaped in real time for a world that was already fully operational before they were old enough to understand what was happening to them. Agnes and Daisy are not women who remember before. They are the product of the before being erased. That is a different and in some ways more chilling story than June’s, because June had something to lose and knew it. These girls do not know what they are missing.

The show hit me differently than I expected. I had already watched all of The Handmaid’s Tale and found it hard but manageable. This one I had to pause.

I grew up in fundamentalist Christianity. Not Gilead, obviously, but close enough that certain things in this story are not metaphor for me. They are memory. I had my mouth washed out with soap. I was taught that when I started menstruating I would be a woman, with all the weight that word carried in that world, which is to say I would be marriageable. The adult men in my life sexualized me. There was real and serious talk about the men in my family having a say in who I would marry. The idea that my stepfather might choose my husband was not a dystopian plot point. It was a thing that was said out loud.

I left religion, eventually, with a significant assist from foster care, which removed me from that world before it could close around me completely. By the time I was an adult I was already out. That distance meant The Handmaid’s Tale, for all its horror, felt like a warning about something I had mostly escaped. This show does not feel that way. This show feels like a document of something I lived through a version of, and it is hitting different in 2026 than it would have at any other moment, because we are watching real policy move in the same direction as the fiction in real time.

Margaret wrote The Testaments in 2019 and she has said she did not invent anything that has not already happened somewhere. That is the line that stays with me. None of this is invention. It is just amplification. And the show, which is genuinely well made and devastating, understands that the most effective horror is not the spectacle of cruelty but the quiet normalization of it. The girls at Aunt Lydia’s school are not being tortured. They are being educated. That is the point.

The first few episodes are on Hulu now. New episodes drop weekly through May 27th. Read the book first if you can. And if any of this resonates with your own history, be gentle with yourself going in.

The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)

by Margaret Atwood
Published by: Anchor Books
on September 10, 2019
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More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.
Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways.
With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.
The Testaments is a modern masterpiece, a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to Margaret Atwood's classic, The Handmaid's Tale.