I Just Started Watching “The Handmaid’s Tale” Six Years After It First Aired

I was surprised by how good it was — and how scary!

Jorie Mar
2 min readAug 10, 2023

I read Margaret Atwood’s novel 38 years ago (yikes!) when it first came out. (If I recall correctly, I got it via my brief membership in the Quality Paperback Book Club, which had great selections that I often wouldn’t have heard of otherwise.) The Hulu show was on my “to watch sometime” list. It’s a long list.

What finally moved Handmaid’s Tale to the front of the line was seeing the dramatic photos of the red-robed and white-wimpled women in recent protests in Israel. The book was one thing, but the TV show has taken on a life of its own and has become part of the culture around the world.

I watched the first episode a couple of nights ago. It wasn’t quite what I expected. From the first frame, it was a tense thriller that soon turned into horror. I usually avoid scary movies and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure if I would get through it, but I was riveted.

It’s a cliche now to say that the Handmaid’s Tale is even more relevant now than at the time the book was first published. Yet, it’s true. Just today, someone posted in a social media group for women that a friend of a friend wanted to go to Colorado and was looking for a network. The dozens of comments…

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Jorie Mar

Semi-hopeful New Yawka. Baby boomer. Inactive attorney. Content mill veteran. Aspiring humor writer. semihopeful@gmail.com Twitter: @semihopeful