Reshaping the dystopia through seriality and the sentimental narrative in Hulu's The handmaid's tale

Abstract

This paper analyzes the dystopian television serial The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-), adapted from the homonymous 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, by centralizing the intersection of the characteristics of the dystopian genre and the rhythms and features of American serial television. The primary question is whether understanding the serial format of contemporary American television can help explain some of the choices that were made in the Hulu adaptation regarding Offred’s characterization when compared to Atwood’s novel, as well as to the larger literary dystopian tradition that inspired it. Drawing on the contributions of scholars who discuss the centrality of target-context conditioners in the process of adaptation, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale is examined against a corpus of scholarly writing that attempts to describe the characteristics of U.S. serial television storytelling. Following Mittell’s discussion of “serial melodrama” in Complex TV, the episodic and seasonal structure of The Handmaid’s Tale is examined considering the way it interacts with Robyn Warhol’s conception of the sentimental narrative and with Linda Williams’s approach to melodrama. The argument defended in this paper is that the episodic rhythm of the television serial, combined with its subscription to an “infinite model” of storytelling, transforms the classic dystopian structure in significant ways.