It’s the end of the world as we know it. At least, it is on television. “The Handmaid’s Tale”…
It’s the end of the world as we know it. At least, it is on television. “The Handmaid’s Tale” returned to Hulu this week for a third season. On it, the heroine, June, will continue to combat the horrors of a futuristic, theocratic America in which women have been stripped of reproductive freedom.
On the same day, the high-tech dystopia “Black Mirror” returned to Netflix. Both are huge Emmy-winning hits for those platforms, and in 2017 “The Handmaid’s Tale” proved to be Hulu’s most-watched series premiere ever, according to the entertainment website IGN.
Perhaps out of some desire to compete, HBO is primed to release “Years And Years,” a futuristic drama in which Emma Thompson plays a far-right politician who, over the course of 15 years (beginning in 2019), “tears Britain apart,” according to IndieWire.
That’s immediately after the end of their surprise hit with the miniseries “Chernobyl,” currently the highest-rated TV series of all time on IMDb.
None of these shows are drawing in viewers because they’re fun. Dealing with the aftermath of the nuclear explosion in 1986, a particularly bleak episode of “Chernobyl” featured the cleanup crew shooting radioactive puppies in the zone around the power plant.
