The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu = amazing

I recently started reading a lot instead of watching television for the most part and I think that has done me some good. I remember reading somewhere that when we read, we engage our brain a great deal more than if we are doing something passive like watching TV and I can see where they are coming from with that. I have dozed off by watching a show many times but I think this is pretty difficult to do if you are reading a book. When reading I tend to remain quite engaged and it is not to say that I don't get tired when reading a book, but I focus on what it is that I am staring at pretty intently and will put the book down if I start to doze off. You can really say that with a show or movie.

Anyway, I have been at the mercy of what my local friend who has a ton of books happens to have in stock when I need something new to read and one of those books was The Handmaid's Tale which was a story that of course I had heard of but had been putting off because it was called The Handmaid's Tale. I found out the other day when I was looking at some random website about how Hulu had made a serious about this amazing story so I went out to grab it. Unlike basically everything I have been watching on TV in the past 4 months or so, this show is absolutely fantastic.

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So apparently this has been out for quite some time but I was just unaware of the fact that it existed. For some reason I had this idea in my head that the show was Korean and maybe there is one of those as well but the story in the book takes place in the United States although I suppose you could apply it to just about anywhere in the world if you just adapted the story a bit.

I really don't want to give anything away about this show because I think it is something that people should really have a look at or even better, I think that someone should go and read the book.

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Basically, this book and the series (thus far) is a story about how for some reason or another which they don't get into great detail as to how and why, the United States decided to severely revert on its laws and return to an extremely puritan way of life including eliminating most modern fashion and technology. The major focus of the show is the near complete elimination of women's rights because of the fact that there were some powerful people that believed that the drop in fertility rates was a sign of God's wrath towards how far the population had strayed from him and therefore society becomes extremely controlled in an effort to prevent the population from dying out.

Everything is watched very closely by the powers that be and everyone must live in constant fear of being accused of this or that which will result in their execution of being sent off to labor camps. There are probably some people out there that wouldn't mind seeing us return to a life like this but not the sensible people.

The film is told in modern times but you can tell pretty early on that it has been enforced by the powers that be that most technology is not available to most people and that the population is being kept intentionally uninformed about everything.

At first glance, this show, if you are aren't familiar with the source material, looks like an excellent chance for Hulu and Hollywood to run wild with some sort of "metoo" objective and to vilify men. Thankfully that is not the case at all here and this story is based on a book that was written back in 1985 before the world started to lose their minds and attempt to make all things we see on screen about some sort of political or social-justice indoctrination.

Now, I can't say that I am always going to like this show because I have read the book and they go through an awful lot of that book just in the first episode. The book is only just over 300 pages so making 10 episodes out of that much story can't be easy... and now I find out that they have 4 more seasons of it. I will probably end up falling out with it later after they have actually used all of the information contained in the novel, but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

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_{it's scary not in a jumpscare type way, but more of an eerie and dreadful way}

So far the show is captivating and terrifying and everyone who is cast in it, especially Elisabeth Moss who plays the primary role of "Offred." Another aspect of the show that really does it for me is the incredible musical decisions. The soundtrack, for the most part, is just perfect for what is going on and it feels more like a very nicely polished movie than it does an ongoing series. I don't really like it when they insert modern music into because it seems so out of place compared to the other musical score but thankfully they do not do this very often.

So I'm suggesting that you get out there and see this one or at least the first season. I have only been through the first 3 episodes but every one of those was so good that I hesitated about whether or not I should watch another one. Sensibility kicked in because it was already past midnight so I chose to go to sleep instead, but not before reading a chapter of the book I am currently working on now called Watership Down which unfortunately is not nearly as good of a read as I had hoped.