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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
97
Mixed:
20
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Oct 16, 2025
Season 6 Review:
Hearing and watching them [Luke and Moira] spell out how much her [June's] savior complex has depleted their patience in a few key scenes almost makes up for the tens of prior episodes flavored by their deference to her unstoppable will. .... You may lose count of the number of times you ask yourself why June and everyone else are doing what they’re doing again and expecting a different result. Watching the definition of madness in action can be maddening.
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The TelegraphMay 5, 2025
Season 6 Review:
If the gore is gone, there isn’t much to take its place. There are moments during these new episodes when a keener satirical edge might have made all the difference. But while it refuses the easy bait of drawing parallels between Gilead and Donald Trump’s White House, the alternative is to slog through the motions.
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IndieWireApr 8, 2025
Apr 8, 2025
Season 6 Review:
The story they’ve [showrunners Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman] opted for isn’t hope exactly, but more wish-fulfillment. If you are a progressive who has sat through too many awkward Thanksgiving dinners with conservative relatives or who cackles at every post in the Leopards Ate My Face subreddit, then has Hulu got a show for you.
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Apr 8, 2025
Season 6 Review:
Taken on its own merits, there are definitely interesting story prospects for the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. .... While it might be cathartic to watch June, Moira and others try to bring the government down, the show now might be too close to reality for our comfort.
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Apr 8, 2025
Season 6 Review:
Like its first season, the drama’s sixth one arrives designed to meet this moment, showing us the risks that must be taken, again and again, to dismantle an out-of-control, overreaching power structure. It can’t happen overnight. .... This may not necessarily make you emotionally eager to watch these final episodes, but it does make this season as attuned to where we are in 2025 as the first was to the Zeitgeist in 2017.
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Apr 3, 2025
Season 6 Review:
This season builds at a much more engaging pace than the past few ones. There is a sense of purpose and urgency that was especially missing last season, as well as a very cinematic execution, from Adam Taylor’s inspiring score and some effective Radiohead needle drops to the show’s signature framings of expressive faces. The jury is still obviously out on the last two installments, but this final bow sure feels like a triumphant comeback.
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ColliderApr 3, 2025
Season 6 Review:
The episodes are a little uneven, with some lag in the beginning as well as moments of needless exposition. Overall, the series still concludes with a well-written, incisive outing that reminds us why it has long been necessary in our era, and why it remains more necessary than ever.
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Sep 14, 2022
Season 5 Review:
The Hulu series obviously hasn’t lost any of its relevance, and indeed, some of its themes resonate in a more pointed manner. Yet while this season continues the grinding march toward the end of June’s story, it reinforces a sense that despite the promise of a conclusion that lies ahead, the show’s best days are behind it.
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Sep 14, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Despite Moss’ best efforts, the show is breaking at the seams when it comes to its larger narrative. ... Unless you’re already a dedicated Handmaid’s Tale fan, you can skip the drudgery of this season and check back in with June when the series comes to a close with Season 6.
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ColliderSep 9, 2022
Season 5 Review:
All in all, Season 5 is full of scarce highs and really low lows, lots of heavy-hitting drama, and emotional scenes. Some of the biggest events of this season lead to some pretty uncomfortable viewing, but viewers who stick with it will be rewarded with some huge moments that will have repercussions for the final season.
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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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IndieWireSep 8, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Moss remains an aughts-era TV star, deserving all the acclaim and allegiance once given to stars of the silver screen (before movie stars were replaced by superheroes and intellectual property). But no matter your impression of the actor tasked with fueling a hit show for a few more seasons, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is spinning its wheels in Season 5.
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TV Guide MagazineMay 6, 2021
Season 4 Review:
Grueling and gripping. [10-23 May 2021, p.9]
Apr 29, 2021
Season 4 Review:
While the fourth season moves toward breaking that old catch and release merry-go-round, it doesn't sufficiently persuade us to wholly invest in any hints at evolving beyond it. June despises Gilead and hates it more each time she's forced to go back, but without providing a vision as to where the story's headed the best we can muster in reaction to her plight is a yawn.
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The Daily BeastApr 28, 2021
IndieWireApr 28, 2021
Season 4 Review:
The first three episodes of Season 4’s back half are not outstanding, though No. 8 is pretty damn close. They’re just good — they do what needs to be done, they do it well, and they don’t waste any time (well, they don’t waste as much time). June’s evolution pushes the series beyond the traumatic horrors of past seasons and into unsettling antihero territory. Eventually, Season 4 delivers on delayed payoffs and does so with as much urgency and, dare I say, joyous gratification as one can expect from this show.
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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 27, 2021
Season 4 Review:
The show has become another one of TV’s never-ending stories, another “Homeland,” where seasons are crammed with action-adventure filler, as June runs from one safe house to another, always escaping from seemingly inescapable situations. ... By the time I reached the third episode of the new season, I remembered all the criticisms of the show’s excessive violence, and I had to concede. The show seems to fetishize June’s punishments.
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Apr 23, 2021
Season 4 Review:
As the fourth season moves along, so do plot similarities to past seasons and repetitions. Captures happen. Tortures happen. People die; sometimes because of June and sometimes not. ... Moss, with her stiff upper lip and watery blue eyes, is still one of the finest actresses this side of Meryl Streep. ... There’s an excellent subplot regarding Rita (Amanda Brugel). ... It also works when Handmaid’s Tale pokes fun at itself.
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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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Jun 4, 2019
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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May 29, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Maybe the second half of the season will turn things around. Unfortunately, six hours is a long time to slog through a story that just seems to get more and more depressing. June glaring into the camera with apparent promises of revolt, backed by a revolutionary-themed rock song (which happens more than once), doesn’t count as actual plot progression.
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IndieWireMay 29, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Moss’ stalwart turn is more than enough to keep viewers’ rooted in June’s struggle. The set design, costumes, lighting, and more formal elements also burst with life, guiding the eye wherever it needs to be and providing a more active experience than the scripts would by themselves. Even with all these valuable attributes, “The Handmaid’s Tale” bites off more than it wants to chew.
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TV Guide MagazineApr 26, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Silence speaks volumes as June withstands the psychological abuse of the fearsome Aunnt Lydis (ann Dowd) and endures domestic tension. [30 Apr - 13 May 2018, p.13]
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 25, 2018
Season 2 Review:
The first five hours of Season 2 offer little more than relentless misery, and they lean more into horror as a genre than the first season did, layering gory imagery on top of trauma on top of despair. ... The task for a show like this one is to offer not just more of the same, but some sense that women have the capacity to enact change. It’s highly possible The Handmaid’s Tale will do just that in the second half of the new season, but there’s an awful lot to endure before we get there.
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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 23, 2018
Season 2 Review:
It’s become a confident, emotionally rich series--but one that, by nature and obligation, is wrenching to watch. ... Often, though, The Handmaid’s Tale feels so determined not to be misread, to treat its subject with gravity, that its storytelling is heavy-handed and its peripheral characters stiff. Fortunately, the central performance is anything but. ... Without someone as expressive as Ms. Moss, The Handmaid’s Tale might not pull off its balancing acts.
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Apr 23, 2018
Season 2 Review:
The new season of The Handmaid's Tale takes special delight in allowing bubbles of hope to surface in this opaque, sorrowful mire, only to submerge them before they can break open. Taken in large doses this makes for tough, wearying viewing. It’s also worth every moment of discomfort it dishes out. For now, we can take it.
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UPROXXApr 23, 2018
Season 2 Review:
The new episodes deftly explore what happens next for June and everyone else in a way that feels true to the source material, while also feeling a bit looser and more sure of itself now that the story is wholly the series’ own. ... In many ways it was even better than The Handmaid's Tale's already impressive debut season.
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Apr 20, 2018
Season 2 Review:
This is not only an important show, one that gets into your head as few TV series can, it is also pretty much a masterpiece. ... Once again, the performances are astounding. And once again, the most astounding is Emmy winner Moss. ... The rest of the cast is extraordinary.
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Apr 19, 2018
Season 2 Review:
The Handmaid's Tale remains intellectually nourishing, easy to admire, and difficult to endure. It's a beautiful test of stamina, offering only small reprieves from June's suffering. It embeds us alongside her, and remains dedicated to illustrating how exactly the villains can win.
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Apr 18, 2018
Season 2 Review:
For those fascinated by how a society such as ours can devolve relatively quickly into a misogynist nightmare, and by how fragile our moral balance is, there’s nothing better out there, even the miraculous “Dark Mirror.” And The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t intriguing on a conceptual level only; it’s a deeply personal story about a few women who’ve been abducted. ... TV storytelling at its boldest.
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IndieWireApr 18, 2018
Apr 16, 2018
Season 2 Review:
The Handmaid’s Tale is just as brutal, visually pointed, and brilliantly acted as it was in season one. ... The former Mad Men star must wear an even wider variety of masks this season, and she takes them on and off with such controlled ease that it is sometimes staggering. ... She’s surrounded by equally convincing actors.
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Apr 16, 2018
Season 2 Review:
As a cautionary tale, Handmaid’s is never moralizing or hysterical, instead constructing a pervasive mood of dread through quiet, deliberate storytelling. Uncomfortable images linger--the camera watches, unflinchingly, for a full minute as a character performs a bloody act of self-mutilation in the premiere--and some of the most powerful scenes have no dialogue, yet swell with intense emotion: fear, hope, despair, desire.
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Apr 16, 2018
Season 2 Review:
In addition to being dark, the first six episodes of the new season are very, very good, something nobody could have taken for granted with Miller and company moving farther and farther from Atwood's source material (and with Morano too busy with a burgeoning feature career to return behind the camera this time around). With Moss again leading the way, The Handmaid's Tale continues to thrive in many of the same emotional, yet soaringly beautiful, ways it succeeded last year--though several key flaws remain unimproved and are sometimes even exacerbated because everything else around them is so good.
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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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ColliderApr 16, 2018
Apr 16, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Moss is the putative star of this vehicle, but Bledel is going to give her a run for her money. ... Increasing the episode count from 10 to 13 seems to have encouraged the writers to slow down the storyline and, worse, pad out each hour with flashbacks. There are too many of them. Some scenes of Moss waiting in limbo feel just like that. Waiting.
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May 16, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The icky, idiosyncratic force of Morano’s early episodes dims slightly, as the show hints at a more conventional path: “Escape from Gilead.” Maybe this move is inevitable; it might succeed. But there’s something lost along the way--the special beauty of a bleak ending.
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Apr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Moss is stellar in the role, perfectly able to convey simultaneous resistance and forced acceptance of the bleak social structure. It's in the show's writing, though, that the true genius lies. There's not a single dull moment the whole series. Even when it starts to feel a little too close to home, it's impossible to look away.
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Apr 26, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Atwood's spare narrative is haunting in the horrors it only hints at. The Hulu adaptation is 10 episodes (and judging from the gripping first three, hopefully there will be many more). The narrative is more fully fleshed out, and obviously more visceral, but it still leaves a lot to the imagination.
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Apr 26, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Through careful direction and precise writing shaped by showrunner Bruce Miller, this is a drama that is remarkable in its ability to horrify while maintaining a delicate air. As threatening and oppressive as the world of Gilead is, the series has an energetic stamina about it that prevents the story from sinking under the weight of despondency.
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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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Apr 25, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It’s an astounding work of television, with a distinct visual palette that makes it seem as instantly authoritative as the book. ... Strahovski’s performance is as sharp and as unpredictable as Moss’s, and together the two actors expertly mine the gender dynamics of Atwood’s book.
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Apr 24, 2017UPROXXApr 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 21, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Yet for all the horror of the show, I did not find watching it to be an entirely hopeless experience. The miniseries does not come with the novel’s stress-relieving framing device but Offred, with her sardonic asides, her sense of humor, the disobedience in her soul, if not her manner, is bracing company: She’s in this to survive.
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