Didn't finish watching The Handmaid's Tale? Here's why people stopped watching

After premiering to critical and audience acclaim in 2017, The Handmaid's Tale — the televisual adaptation of Margaret Atwood's dystopian classic — became the first streaming series to win an Emmy for Outstanding Drama.

Now as the show reaches its conclusion, it's clear the series has had a broader impact than simply making TV history.

Written shortly after Ronald Reagan won the US presidency in 1980, Atwood's novel imagined a future in which the extreme religious right established a totalitarian regime in the aftermath of a civil war in America, amid plummeting worldwide fertility rates.

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Under the theocracy of Gilead, women are treated as property and placed into a new patriarchal hierarchy of social classes.

The titular handmaids are fertile women who are forced into the role of natal slaves for high-ranking officials and their ultimately powerless (but complicit) wives, as part of a desperate bid to repopulate.

For a while, the TV adaptation was at the very centre of the Zeitgeist, with an influence that transcended think pieces and post-weekly-appointment-viewing discussions.

But as political attitudes shifted, so did the show's position in pop culture.

Just four years on from its historic Emmys win, The Handmaid's Tale set another record by becoming the biggest loser in the awards show's history.

Despite increasingly bad reviews and reports of declining viewership, the grim Elisabeth Moss-led series continued for two more seasons.

It's now finally ending… sort of; a new spin-off series based on Atwood's long-awaited 2019 sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, is currently in production.

How did we get here? And what legacy can the show expect after whatever those last few seasons were?

When The Handmaid's Tale went into production in 2016, Barack Obama was still president of the United States. By the time it began airing, Donald Trump had taken office and the #MeToo movement was picking up momentum.

Associate professor Lauren Rosewarne from The University of Melbourne is a social scientist who specialises in pop culture. She believes the first season of The Handmaid's Tale was so well received because "it was able to harness what women were feeling and fearing".

Erin Harrington, a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury agrees.

Harrington's area of research is horror media and its depiction of women and violence, and she thinks the show's creators did a "remarkable" job of adapting the source material to the era.

"That first season … did some really clever things in terms of the visual style and music that were in lock-step with what it was trying to express about the insidiousness and the horrendous ideology of this world."

There were the breathtaking "God's eye" overhead shots that fostered a sense of the handmaids' powerlessness; the commitment to clean lines and geometric designs that symbolised the sterility and rigidity of Gilead; and the intimate close-ups of protagonist Moss that forced audiences to consider the experience of the individual under such a horrific regime.

This was paired with a frequently dissonant score, distinct colour grades that expertly differentiated between life before and after Gilead, and a career-defining performance by Moss as June the handmaid.

But two big things changed after the show's second season: the TV series was forced to diverge from Atwood's narrative after outpacing the original novel; and the culture changed.

"What [The Handmaid's Tale] spoke to in terms of the rage women were feeling in the 2017, 2018 moment, got replaced culturally by a sense of overwhelming fatigue and sadness," Rosewarne explains.

The academic (who's currently writing a book on Zeitgeists) says The Handmaid's Tale faced two choices: either adapt or face losing its audience.

It doubled down.

From season three, The Handmaid's Tale assumed a Groundhog Day-like narrative in which June miraculously managed to escape Gilead's clutches, only to choose to return over and over and over again.

With every passing season, her motives became less clear and more exasperating.

At the same time, June's former mistress and anti-hero, Serena Joy Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski), experienced questionable levels of character development, before repeatedly reverting to her old ways.

Harrington says the series' multi-season TV show format — which requires long arcs, multiple characters and perspectives — may have been partly to blame for this "perplexing" shift.

But she doesn't feel this excuses the show's increasing tendency to "almost luxuriate in violence" and a "weird sort of [girl-power] celebration".

She points to the second-last episode of season six as one example, which recently made headlines for its use of a new version of 'Look What You Made Me Do' by Taylor Swift as a needle drop.

Harrington sees the use of the track, which came as June led a resistance group to attack several high-ranking members of the Gilead regime (who later die in a plane crash), as "shallow feminism" and markedly different to the cultural symbolism of the show's earlier seasons.

"How does that sit alongside a show that, at least initially, wanted to be about the way our culture is built on a bedrock of misogyny?

"That's not to say that pop music can't [do that], because of course it's also really important. But boy, it does your head in seeing those things side by side."

Rosewarne is wary of putting declining viewership down to a backlash against graphic violence, pointing out "the audience lapped up Game of Thrones until the end".

"But if that violence is compounded with all the other stuff, it can add to the feeling of a show being unappetising escapism and a masochistic experience," she reasons.

It even became too much for some of the cast — Samira Wiley, who featured in all six seasons, cited being "done with the trauma" as a reason for not reprising her role in The Testaments.

Like many former viewers and critics, Rosewarne thinks there also came a point when the idea of Gilead felt too close to reality.

"Flash forward to Trump's re-election [in 2024] and the overturning of Roe Vs Wade [in 2022], how do you consume this as an entertainment product when in real life stuff that's not so far away from what's in the show is happening?" she says.

On top of all that, The Handmaid's Tale — both book and show — have long faced criticism over their failure to acknowledge the historical experiences of African American women in similar contexts.

"There was an element of disconnect that things that were presented as a potential horrifying future had actually been a horrifying past for some women of colour in the United States," Rosewarne says.

It's hard to know what the legacy of a show like The Handmaid's Tale will be when it's only just ended.

But Rosewarne and Dr Harrington think it's telling that the handmaid's uniform has become a symbol donned by protesters across the globe, with the imagery of the red cloak and white hat now a shorthand for talking about women's oppression.

Rosewarne is unsure whether this show will be largely forgotten — like the bizarrely sexualised 1990 film adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale — or remembered for harnessing the sentiments of a moment in time.

"Maybe it's a bit of both," she says.

Harrington thinks The Handmaid's Tale will be remembered as one of many thought-provoking shows and movies that explored the issues of reproductive rights and women's freedom in this era.

"But I think that conversation will be about the earlier parts of the show, as opposed to the end where it turned into just another 'gritty, violent drama' about how violence begets violence and oppression begets oppression … with 'nod, nod, wink, wink', girlboss approaches to protest."

The last episode of The Handmaid's Tale season six airs on Neon from on 27 May.