Television series

The Handmaid's Tale

Name: The Handmaid's Tale
Genre: Drama, Science Fiction
Released: 2017
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd, Max Minghella, Samira Wiley

Gilead is what happens when a nation's worst instincts get a fundamentalist paint job and a uniform. Elisabeth Moss carries season after season of dread, defiance and slow-burn rage as a woman stripped of her name and her daughter, and the show never lets you forget its horrors were assembled from things people already believe. Punishing, gorgeous, built for those who can sit with despair and still want more.

TVMaze rating

7.4

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Station Eleven2021

Civilisation collapses and a wandering theatre troupe keeps performing anyway, insisting that art and memory matter even when the world doesn't. It's a dystopia obsessed with what people protect rather than what they lose, and it's strangely, stubbornly hopeful.

But The structure jumps around in time and mood, which some find disorienting rather than rewarding.

The Man in the High Castle2015

Nazis and Imperial Japan split America after winning WWII, and the show digs into how ordinary people rationalise living under monstrous regimes — a chilling companion piece to Gilead's domestic totalitarianism, just scaled up to a whole continent.

But It sprawls across multiple plotlines and loses narrative discipline in its later seasons, testing patience.

Years and Years2019no page yet

A British family's ordinary lives are dragged through fifteen years of political upheaval, technological creep and rising authoritarianism, watched in real time. It's Gilead's slow-motion version — the same warning, told as a family drama instead of a nightmare.

But Its speculative elements can feel rushed compared to its grounded family scenes, an uneven tonal mix.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Children of Men2006

Same premise — global infertility, authoritarian response — but swaps Gilead's domestic horror for a road movie built on momentum and one desperate act of hope.

Almost no children have been born in eighteen years, and civilisation has curdled into despair and fascist border control. It's Gilead's fertility catastrophe again, but told as a breathless single-take chase thriller with a man, not a mother, forced to protect the one impossible birth.

But It's bleak, violent and offers almost nothing in the way of hope until its final, ambiguous minute.

Orphan Black2013

Tatiana Maslany plays a dozen women whose bodies are owned, patented and experimented on by men who think they know better — a sci-fi thriller that turns reproductive control into a genuinely thrilling conspiracy story.

But The mythology gets increasingly convoluted, and the corporate conspiracy plotting can overwhelm the character work.

The Power2023no page yet

Teenage girls suddenly develop the ability to electrocute at will, and the world's gender hierarchy flips overnight. It's Gilead's mirror image — a fantasy about women seizing power instead of having it stripped away.

But The ensemble is large and the plotting occasionally more interested in scale than intimacy.

Brave New World2020no page yet

Huxley's engineered utopia gets a slick modern makeover, swapping Gilead's puritanical cruelty for a pleasure-drugged, surveillance-heavy alternative — proof that control doesn't need suffering when it can offer comfort instead.

But It never quite matches the source novel's bite, and the finale disappointed longtime fans.

Chernobyl2019

Not science fiction, but a true story about a totalitarian system that lies to itself until the lies become lethal. It shares Gilead's interest in ordinary people caught inside a machine built on denial.

But It's five hours of unrelenting dread with a body count, and no reprieve at the end.

The Leftovers2014

Two percent of the world's population vanishes overnight, and the show is less about the mystery than the unbearable grief and faith left behind. Like Gilead, it's obsessed with what people do with loss they can't explain.

But It's deliberately opaque and emotionally punishing, refusing easy answers or much comfort at all for anyone.

Snowpiercer2020no page yet

The last humans alive live on a train divided by class, and the show uses that claustrophobic setting to ask who gets to survive and who gets sacrificed — Gilead's caste system on rails.

But The class allegory is heavy-handed, and the pacing sags across some of its longer season arcs.

The Stepford Wives1975

Different decade, different villain, same nightmare: women reshaped from the inside to fit someone else's idea of what a good wife should want.

Long before Gilead, a quiet Connecticut suburb was already turning wives into obedient, smiling objects, one by one. It's a slow-burn horror-satire about the machinery of enforced femininity, made when the fear was suburban conformity rather than theocracy.

But The pacing is dated and its satire is broader and more obvious than the genre now prefers.

Jesus Camp2006

Gilead imagines fundamentalism weaponised by the state; this shows the real training happening in gymnasiums and living rooms already.

A real documentary following American evangelical children being trained for spiritual warfare, weeping and speaking in tongues on command. It's Gilead's ideology minus the fiction — the same certainty, the same language, aimed at kids instead of adults.

But It's uncomfortable rather than entertaining, offering no narrative arc or resolution, just unfiltered observation of belief in action.