How 'The Handmaid's Tale' became TV's most chilling Trump-era series

ROLLING STONE 
By Phoebe Reilly

'Handmaid's Tale' star Elisabeth Moss and show's creators talk about turning Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel into a look at our post-Trump world. Hulu

The promise of a "new normal," spoken by an apparatchik of a totalitarian theocracy – it's chilling, and like so many other scenes in The Handmaid's Tale, Hulu's 10-episode adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian classic, it stays with you in part because it doesn't feel unfamiliar enough. Like the book, the series – starring Elisabeth Moss, Joseph Fiennes, and Alexis Bledel, and which begins streaming on April 26th – takes place in the former United States now known as Gilead. A surveillance state with Puritanical roots, the nation has responded with violence to plunging birth rates caused by environmental crisis. The day after Trump was elected, sales of Atwood's book increased 200% from the year before. It shot to the top of Amazon's bestseller list, alongside George Orwell's 1984. [link]