In the second season of Handmaid’s Tale, everything is different. It has to be. For one, the first season's plot burned through almost all of its source material, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel of the same name. For another, the inaugural season was filmed during the 2016 election cycle—a time when many thought America might be on the way to its first female presidency—and Season 2 was written and filmed entirely during the administration of President Donald Trump.
To say those factors influenced the latest installments of Hulu’s Emmy-winning show would be an understatement. From its deep dives into crackdowns on the rights of LGBTQ people to its déjà vu-inducing scenes of ICE agents herding people at airports, a great many things in Season 2 feel familiar, like watching MSNBC rather than a streaming show. That's no accident. The show has a writers’ room full of news junkies, says showrunner Bruce Miller, and it was inevitable that what they read and saw on in the news would find its way into their scripts.
"All of those things influence discussion in the writer's room. Not specifically like, 'Hey, we should do this for this TV show because it's happening now,'" Miller says. "But a lot of Gilead [the show's fictional country] is people saying things that you're shocked they still believe. And when that's happening in the real world, as disquieting as it is, it does help us understand."
One of the most disquieting of those moments, at least in the first few episodes, comes in a flashback to the life of Emily/Ofglen (Alexis Bledel) before America became Gilead. Back then she was a college professor who was married to, and had a child with, a woman named Sylvia (Clea DuVall). As the new government begins cracking down on queer rights, the couple decides to try to go to Canada, leading to a harrowing scene where immigration agents inform them that Sylvia and their young son can leave, but Emily cannot because their marriage is no longer valid. Watching it, it’s hard not to be reminded of both the years-long struggle for marriage equality and the chaotic scenes at US airports after Trump issued his travel ban in early 2017. Miller acknowledges news images from that time influenced that scene, as did scenes from Nazi Germany and refugee crises in places like Rwanda and Darfur. “We certainly get visual cues and a really good sense of what would really happen [from real-world scenarios],” Miller says, “but we try to stay focused on telling our story because otherwise it just ends up being us gluing modern things into this story just to make a point.”
Handmaid's Tale, however, definitely still has points to make. (Though, if you're wondering, it still occasionally struggles with how to handle race.) As June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) attempts her escape from Gilead at the start of the second season, she hides out in the vacant building that once housed The Boston Globe. June—still wondering what happened to the country she once knew—is left in its offices trying to put together the pieces.
The image of a once-bustling newsroom abandoned is one Miller found quite powerful. "For us, what we do is think, 'What would Gilead hit first?'" he says. “And the same way that people in power who don’t like news coverage start attacking the press, we think, ‘What’s the next step? After you attack the press verbally, do people start to attack the press physically?’ There’s no free press in Gilead, so when did the press become unfree?”
As June sorts through old issues of the Globe looking for missed warning signs of the regime to come, it’s easy to be reminded of the surprised responses of many Americans to not only the policies of the Trump administration but also to things like the vocal white supremacist demonstrations that took over Charlottesville last summer. Most people, like June, just wanted to know, Why didn’t anyone see this coming?
“It's not our job to do the nightly news; it is our job to be dramatic storytellers, but our themes so unfortunately reflect this pre-Gilead existence we have under the Trump administration. So we do reflect that,” says executive producer Warren Littlefield. "But boy, the fight for human rights, the fight for feminist rights, those are reflected in the world we're living in and they’re certainly essential to Gilead.”
And they were also crucial in Atwood’s book. Even though much of Season 2 of Hulu’s show focuses on events not contained in her novel, they still very much revolve around Atwood’s themes. Miller began talking with the author about what could happen once the story moved beyond her pages during the first season and ultimately he hopes that although his staff is working in the "terrifying sandbox of national treasure Margaret Atwood" they are doing so with her endorsement. To that end, they're exploring the worlds she only flicked at, like the colonies where "unwomen" who can't have children are sent to clean up toxic waste and the places in Canada where American refugees settle. "The interesting thing is that the person who was most excited about going beyond the book and communicated no fear about that was Margaret Atwood,” says Littlefield.
But just because the dystopian near-future of this season of Handmaid’s Tale was able to borrow from current events, doesn’t mean the show’s creators think society is doomed. In fact, they see their show as optimistic, rather than a cautionary tale.
“Season 2 is a powerful ride, but we lace it with hope,” says Littlefield. “I’m old enough to have lived through the Vietnam War protests; I was arrested in Washington. Out of that adversity and corruption in the Nixon administration came tremendous social change, and so we don't want to be hope-less. That's an important element of what we brought to Season 2.”
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