Critic Reviews

One of the best shows of the year so far, at times hard to watch but impossible to ignore. ... [Elisabeth Moss] fully commands each and every moment, every swallowed emotion and thought.

None of this would work without a great performance at its center, and as Offred, Moss is astonishing. ... At every corner, The Handmaid’s Tale brims with invention.

This is probably the spring's best new show and certainly its most important.

As a show, The Handmaid's Tale is as crisply and elegantly made as anything I've seen on TV this year. It manages to bring a dystopian story to life in a way that works as episodic TV, sapping none of the book's power. This is a show that could work anytime and one that will likely be watched and discussed for years to come.

A faithful adaptation of the book that also brings new layers to Atwood’s totalitarian, sexist world of forced surrogate motherhood, this series is meticulously paced, brutal, visually stunning, and so suspenseful from moment to moment that only at the end of each hour will you feel fully at liberty to exhale.

The [actors] performances--and the show’s resonant, shrewdly paced writing-- anchor the drama in something beyond speculative bogey-man sci-fi, making the story feel less like a quasi-fictional fable than an entirely possible preview of what’s to come.

Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a worthy, heartbreaking adaptation of the text, anchored by strong performances and profound visual grammar.

The series is gorgeously directed, which in its own way acts as another juxtaposition to the horrors witnessed (rape, group murder, police brutality, genital mutilation, public hangings), allowing Handmaid to show the visual disconnect between the artificial world of peace that Gilead has created versus its sick reality. ... But all eyes should be trained on Moss, who again knocks it out of the park as a woman who must be meek in order to survive, but whose inner self is screaming to be released.

[A] magnificent and effectively haunting 10-episode series.

Painfully timely. It's also absolutely enraging, and completely riveting. ... The Handmaid's Tale isn't just the best original show Hulu has ever done. It's one of the most impressive series of the year.