Comfort TV for Canadians: The Handmaid’s Tale

By Jude Klassen

Why The Handmaid's Tale is a Canadian Comfort Watch -- for now.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale was written a mere 11 years after women were granted the right to open credit card accounts under their own names. Think about that for a hot minute. Her cautionary tale of women’s rights being abruptly reversed resonated with an entire generation (and generations to come). A sobering read, but it was fantasy / science fiction, basically, a what could happen to the USA if Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority actually became a majority. It was never going to become moral.

Like most people, I was instantly besotted with the Hulu TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale when it came out in 2017. It started as a co-watch with my son who made it to the fourth season and then found it too realistic and foreboding. We moved onto a lighter and cheerier show about American dysfunction — Breaking Bad.

On my own I continued to consume The Handmaid’s Tale, and I didn’t find it entirely crushing. Despite all the Canadian scenes being set in a dreary Toronto winter scape, it was vaguely comforting. Our progressive American friends still had somewhere to run to. Future Canada still had human rights, healthcare, and public schools. In Future Canada women weren’t chattel, girls were still educated, it was safe to be queer, and safe to be nonwhite. In Future Canada I could still write this blog without fear of reprisal. In that TV universe, we hadn’t been invaded by Putin’s Useful Idiot. In that TV universe, we hadn’t been flooded with disinformation and our country hadn’t been handed to Harper’s smarmy sock puppet.

In the fifth season, the show explored cracks in the Canadian political ecosystem. Canada was no longer presented as merely the dun-coloured Land of the Polite. Possibly inspired by the 2022 Convoy crisis, the series depicted a hoser mob backlash against former Handmaids entering Canada. Add to that, by popping a healthy baby in sterile times, looking good in teal, and making oppression glamorous again, Serena Joy inspired Commander’s Wife wannabes amongst the Canadian populace. Still, the impression was that the antifeminist mobs were outliers in an otherwise mostly sane population: the closeted fascists weren’t entirely emboldened, we were still a safer haven.

The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale is set to air in 2025, a contentious election year for Canadians. Many suburban and rural Canadians are still watching cable (and YouTube) where they’re being hammered with increasingly absurd Conservative messaging. While they aren’t the majority, they can decide who becomes the next Prime Minister. Look at Ontario: most of our population lives in the cities where we appreciate diversity, walkable neighbourhoods and protected green zones. Yet, we have Thug Ford levelling Toronto's Science Centre, selling off our public land to his corrupt buddies and set to piss away 48 million dollars ripping up Toronto's freshly installed bike lanes. But hey, buck-a-beer, bitches!

We shall see if the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale is still Comfort TV for Canadians or if it reflects our very real fear that there’s nowhere to run to, baby.

Jude is an author and filmmaker who used to cover film and TV for Movie Entertainment Magazine. This is her first TV related piece since 2014.

judeklassenfilmmaker.com