20 Behind-the-Scenes Facts About 'The Handmaid's Tale' (Because Season 5 is Coming!)

We’re really excited about Season 5 of The Handmaid’s Tale getting closer and closer, mainly because it is noise that drowns out The Bad Thoughts. But another major reason for our excitement is that it’s smart noise, so the thought, “why are you wasting your time with this trash?” never even occurs to us. Now, the thought “yeah, no, a theocratic fascist America would be super racist” does pop in our head, and a lot, but perhaps The Handmaid’s Tale is already depressing enough for that level of realness, so we can just ignore it. You know, suspension of disbelief and stuff.

What we’re trying to say is that The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant, complex, and beautiful drama. Besides some awkward girls-get-it-done scenes of fierce strutting and empowering pop music here and there (and, well, awful merch), the show has mostly hit the spot in terms of suspense, action, great character work, elegantly-written dialogue, and the mature, nuanced storytelling its concept deserves. It’s an achievement in every sense, the sort of high quality TV that our inner 15-year-old sci-fi readers could only dream about seeing (at a time we definitely didn’t have the depth to get the novel’s actual ideas). Thus, having already discussed some awesome facts about the Hulu show, we now add some lesser known facts about The Handmaid’s Tale: the show, its performers, its production, and its literary inspiration.