The Handmaid's Tale had a Testaments problem
After six seasons, the final episode of The Handmaid’s Tale aired yesterday and it was… well, underwhelming. The show had written itself into a hole that was almost as hard to escape from as it was for handmaiden’s getting out of Gilead.
There are two paths the series could conceptually take:
Explosive finale with action and our heroes retaking America from the religious far right.
A quiet, contemplative ending.
For a show like The Handmaid’s Tale, option 2 was always going to be the smart choice for tonal reasons. And that’s the direction they took. Episode 9 of 10 gave us the big action finale, leaving episode 10 to give us emotional closure. That’s as it should be.
The problem with making that choice, however, was that for much of the series run, it established rescuing kidnapped daughter Hannah as the series end-game. There’s a hurdle that the show had: author Margaret Atwood wrote a sequel to her book mid-series run called The Testaments that has Hannah as a character living in Gilead 15 years later.
Of course, Hulu announced that it would adapt the book into a TV series sequel to the show. This means that the show couldn’t end with Hannah being rescued by mother June.
And yet… seasons after The Testaments was announced, published, and read by fans, the show continued on a path towards rescuing Hannah.
Instead of giving us what the show had built towards, the final episode ends with June writing a book about her time as a handmaid. We deserved a scene with June at least talking with her daughter - even if it wasn’t the rescue we all had hoped for.
As TV narratives become more complex and we ask more of TV shows passing themselves off as literary fiction, it has become a greater source of friction for viewers when TV shows clumsily don’t follow the story they are telling (whether that is a narrative or a character arc) and instead return to a status quo. That’s not quite what they have done here, but in lining up one show to lead into the next, it failed to consider what the audience needed for catharsis.
News Desk
Adolescence is still rising on the Netflix charts and may soon overtake Stranger Things 4 as Netflix’s second most-watched English language show. Number one continues to be Wednesday. Read: Deadline
In today’s Lindsay Lohan news, she says that she manifested working at Netflix and her career comeback by writing it in her journal and saying it. I’m going to start doing the same. Read: The Wrap
As one hand giveth, the other taketh… Lindsay Lohan says that she can’t keep doing movies like the ones she has been doing with Netflix forever, so is looking to move on. Read: Elle
With After Midnight winding down at CBS, the network is keeping its 12:30am slot (rather than handing it back to affiliates) and is scheduling the long-running, syndicated trash show Comics Unleashed. It’s a comedy panel show hosted by Byron Allen and it is always deeply unfunny. It previously ran in the same slot prior to the launch of After Midnight. I still contend that CBS should use that slot as a second run window for The Daily Show, which pairs well with Colbert. Read: thefutoncritic
Should Australian broadcaster SBS should flip its budget to give NITV a greater source of the funding pie. That’s certainly an idea. Read: TV Tonight
Diane Kruger will narrate Bluey stories for German audiences. These are book adaptations of episodes of the TV show, presented via video. Uh… why not just watch the original episodes? Read: Variety
RIP dog actor Buddy, a performer on Home & Away between 2016-19. By all reports he was a good boy. Read: TV Tonight
The BBC is changing the narrative direction of the series Casualty, shifting it away from the fictional city of Holby to a setting in Wales. Read: Radio Times
That’s the newsletter for today.
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