I think this show will get so many viewers now, more than if it came out a few years ago. Due to the current political climate it will be talked about and viewed by a way wider audience. The producers really lucked out with this one.
LOL you sadists https://youtu.be/6Zxy_dScjsM
Agreed. As I was reading Steve Bannon's Skype transcript from 2014 (https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world), The Handmaid's Tale immediately sprang to mind.
It was interesting what Atwood said of why she chose a religious context for the story:
"... if you wanted to seize power in the US, abolish liberal democracy and set up a dictatorship, how would you go about it? What would be your cover story? It would not resemble any form of communism or socialism: those would be too unpopular.... Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren't there already. Thus China replaced a state bureaucracy with a similar state bureaucracy under a different name, the USSR replaced the dreaded imperial secret police with an even more dreaded secret police, and so forth. The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself. Like any theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid's_Tale
I agree. I hope there are more in the next few years. I don't expect things like this will change minds. Hopefully things like this will encourage and motivate others to take the time and make the effort to make things change though.
share