REVOLUTION ROAD

AH, WHAT A STRANGE JOURNEY Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction classic The Handmaid’s Tale has taken since it was first published in 1985. A satire of the religious right policies fomented during President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the United States, Atwood’s narrative was the ultimate “What if?” thought experiment about what the country might look like if those policies incited a hostile takeover of democracy and the US became a totalitarian patriarchy called Gilead. Sobering, but surely impossible… (Insert nervous laugh). Fast-forward to 2016 when Bruce Miller (The 4400) and executive producer Warren Littlefield (Fargo) were given a straight-toseries order for The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne/Offred, for Hulu. That was just seven months before Donald Trump and his ultra-right wing Republican party won the election…