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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
97
Mixed:
20
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
UPROXXApr 24, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It’s a stunning performance by Moss. ... The more we get to know Ofglen, the harder Bledel’s performance hits, until a pair of scenes late in the third episode will leave you a puddle on the floor from what she does in them. The cast is excellent overall, particularly Dowd and Strahovski. ... Riveting new drama.
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Apr 28, 2021
Season 4 Review:
Season 4 teases something bigger, a pivot to the future, and then takes two steps back once again. By the end of the eight episodes made available for preview, there are hints of something different and promising. But to get there, viewers are subjected to the worst of the series' impulses, as if the first seven episodes were a thumb-twiddling waste of time. And in many ways, they are.
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Apr 16, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Expanding Handmaid's into a multi-season TV series from a single novel by Margaret Atwood was always going to be tricky, and to maintain the core of the series as it moves beyond the book's roadmap, its characters have to suffer. Still, there's only so much trauma audiences can take before it becomes too much. Handmaid's would do well with a lighter touch.
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Sep 9, 2022
Season 5 Review:
June’s anxiety, grief, and guilt are all credible motivations for her violent actions, and Moss performs them convincingly. The problem with The Handmaid’s Tale is that there are a bunch of other stories swirling around Hannah’s, and they are increasingly straining the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief. ... It’s also bonkers. But unfortunately, the show can’t commit entirely to camp mode.
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Sep 8, 2022
Season 5 Review:
“Handmaid’s” is in a new, fascinating era, one that’s at its best when it’s unbounded from current events. Attempts, for instance, to tie the world of Gilead to the new American tradition of child-parent separations at the border are understandable in their intent but fall short. ... The show, in its fifth season, excels when it treats its situations as symbolic and its characters as real.
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Jun 5, 2019
Season 3 Review:
What’s strange about “Handmaid’s Tale” three seasons deep is that it keeps hammering home its greatest hits to the detriment of the possible new avenues it could explore. ... Bledel remains a standout as she portrays Emily’s hesitation and longing. ... Her story is the kind of intimate horror that “The Handmaid’s Tale” once excelled at homing in on, but in its determination to make June a #resistance figure, it keeps leaving its most potentially effective moments by the wayside.
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Apr 24, 2018
Season 2 Review:
In season two, The Handmaid’s Tale continues to be an angry, searing piece of work. When it forces you to hold its infuriated gaze, it makes it clear that your inability to do so for long is exactly the point. But as it continues to broaden its world, the show needs to find a way to get more comfortable with the perspectives that make it most uncomfortable, or risk losing itself in its own myopic tragedy.
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Apr 21, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The problem with Hulu’s Handmaid is that nothing is dreadful enough. ... Ms. Moss’s Offred comments regularly on her condition with outraged, silent vulgarities, and seems appalled by rituals and outrages that had become routine in the book. ... But the original Offred was almost too terrorized to imagine defiance, much less exercise it. And such calibrated portraiture helped make the novel click.
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Jun 4, 2019
Season 3 Review:
[The third season] sustains many of the qualities that first made the show such a talker (and award winner), with memorable performances and a fascinating vision of government oppression and cruelty in the name of God. ...The bad news is that the first half of this season (six episodes were made available for this review) often lapses into the realm of the deadly dull, making long and redundant loops around its original premise and revisiting already established resentments and animosities between characters.
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Apr 25, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Dowd’s performance is absolutely essential to keeping this show from tipping over into excessive self-seriousness. You’ll notice that whenever Handmaid’s Tale shifts away from Lydia and Offred, and back to the Canadian border and the subplot involving Offred’s husband, Luke (O.T. Fagbenle), and Moira (Samira Wiley), the show becomes deadly drab and dull.
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Apr 26, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Moss’s performance is perfect: at once contained and open, withdrawn and bristlingly aware. ... The Handmaid’s Tale can stand on its own as a gripping drama; you don’t need to apply overlays about Trump-era conservatism or, say, parallels to the Duggar family to find its portrait of a women under duress moving.
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