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‘The Testaments’ is set inside an elite girls’ training academy in Gilead.Russ Martin/Supplied
If you’re sitting down to watch the new Hulu/Disney+ series The Testaments, which arrives April 8, it might help to know some plot background, since it’s a sequel to the series The Handmaid’s Tale. But what you’ll discover afresh is how uncannily well both these Margaret Atwood adaptations met and meet their cultural moment.
In 1985, in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s two terms as a conservative U.S. president, Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about June, a woman forced into sex slavery after a fundamental theocratic dictatorship called Gilead takes over the U.S.
In April, 2017 – three months after Donald Trump’s first inauguration as U.S. President – a streaming adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, created by Bruce Miller, launched on Hulu and felt instantly relevant. Trump was courting the Christian right, vowing to end legal abortion, and gearing up to behave like a dictator. Then in October, 2017, the #MeToo movement exploded, and a staggering number of women opened up about having been sexually assaulted. People in Handmaid-red dresses and white bonnets became a feature at protest marches across the U.S.
A map of Margaret Atwood’s Toronto, in her own words
In The Handmaid’s Tale series, most women can’t carry babies to term, but June (Elisabeth Moss) had two daughters: Her first, Hannah, was kidnapped by Gilead forces and raised by adoptive parents as Agnes. Her second, Nicole, was born in Gilead but escaped to Toronto, and later to free regions of the U.S. In 2019, just as the third season of the series ended, Atwood published a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, called The Testaments. The new novel included elements from the series: Chapters narrated by Agnes alternated with chapters narrated by Nicole, building to the moment readers realized they were sisters.
However! The Handmaid’s Tale (series) continued for three more seasons, so by the end, some events in The Testaments (novel) overlapped, but others no longer lined up. To further complicate matters, The Testaments (series), also created by Miller, incorporates some elements from all previous iterations while ignoring others. Blessed be the fruit, it’s a bit confusing, so let’s just focus on the new series.
It’s set inside an elite girls’ training academy in Gilead run by Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) – the same Aunt Lydia who trained Handmaids in the earlier series. Under her eye, young women are not taught to read or think, only to obey men, and tween girls become marriageable the minute they get their periods, typically to husbands who are much, much older. Agnes (Chase Infinity, fresh off her triumphant turn in One Battle After Another) is an obedient daughter of a Gilead commander, preparing herself to wed and run a mood board-perfect household; she has scant memory of her life before her kidnapping.
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The Testaments is as culturally relevant in 2026 as The Handmaid’s Tale was in 2017, writes Johanna Schneller.Russ Martin/Supplied
She’s also looking after a newcomer to Gilead called Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a rebellious teenager who allegedly fled the sinful Sodom of Toronto. But secretly, Daisy has another, potentially lethal agenda. A few other characters from Handmaid’s reappear, including Rita (Amanda Brugel), as does Atwood herself, in another nicely crabby cameo.
(Is Daisy actually Nicole, and will she and Agnes be revealed as June’s daughters, as they are in The Testaments novel? The timeline doesn’t fit – in The Handmaid’s Tale series, they were born several years apart. But Halliday looks an awful lot like Moss, and on TV any twist is possible, so stay tuned.)
Because June narrated The Handmaid’s Tale from her point of view as a victim of state-sanctioned rape, that series had a visceral violence to it, and the stakes were life and death. The women in The Testaments also tiptoe around holding their breath, because minor offences carry outsized repercussions. But overall, the new series has a subtler vibe, about the unchecked entitlement of the powerful, and some women’s willingness to subjugate themselves in exchange for comfort. Over its 10-episode first season, we watch how elite men always close ranks, how oppression poisons the soul and permeates all interactions, how victims are blamed for their own misfortunes, and how the downtrodden can’t rebel if they’re forbidden to communicate with one another.
And that’s precisely what makes The Testaments as culturally relevant in 2026 as Handmaid’s was in 2017. One year into Trump’s second term, we’ve become numb to what used to outrage us. Abortion rights in the U.S. have been hobbled. Their vice-president is urging women to quit work to be stay-at-home mothers. The Epstein files reveal that a should-be-shocking number of powerful men consider it a naughty treat to have sex with trafficked teenage girls. Trad wife TikTokers tell women they’ll be “safer” if they’re subservient to their husbands. And an internet manosphere is expanding like poison gas, led by the likes of Justin Waller, an influencer who uses crude pseudoscience to explain why his “one-sided monogamy” (he has sex with other women, while his wife remains faithful to him) is “biologically correct.”
“Women don’t want to sleep with other men when they love a man,” Waller declares in the Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere. “The mother of my children … she doesn’t talk to other men.” It could easily be a line – an order – in The Testaments.
