"Almost a decade after its première, 'Handmaid’s' retains its signature violence but has thoroughly exhausted its narrative premises...."

"Writing in the Reagan years, [novelist Margaret] Atwood imagined an authoritarianism of the repressive Christian variety. The sexual politics of our era’s conservatives are more prurient and boorish: the misogynists of Gilead say 'Blessed be the fruit'; ours say 'Grab ’em by the pussy.' Still, the sadism of the show’s fictional world finds ample comparisons in our own... In its early seasons, 'The Handmaid’s Tale' was criticized for what some saw as its self-indulgent scaremongering. The show, its detractors sneered, was trauma porn for middle-class women who wanted to see themselves as victims of the Trump age...."

Writes Moira Donegan, in "'The Handmaid’s Tale' Reflects the Exhaustion of Liberal Feminism/What’s most striking about the show, now in its final season, is not its hysteria but its lack of conviction" (The New Yorker).

"As the Trump years wore on, the show, and the women who saw themselves in it, came to be associated with the Resistance era’s embarrassing earnestness: it was excessively self-serious, insufficiently self-aware, and wildly overwrought. When you watch the show now, with the clarity of distance, what’s most striking is not its hysteria but its lack of conviction.... [R]ather than grappling with [real-world] events, the show takes a view of femininity that differs from Gilead’s more in style than in substance. It cheers for its protagonists when they act on behalf of their children, or their men, or the principle of forgiveness.... [T]he show, like the [#MeToo] movement, is weak and lacking in energy, unable to update its assumptions to present circumstances, and almost cripplingly afraid of giving offense...."