10 Shows To Watch If You Love The Handmaid’s Tale

We are now deep in the television offseason. Thanksgiving started the train of midseason finales and with the end of His Dark Materials even the shortened shows the public has embraced have finally reached their terminus. Watchmen is over, See is over, The Mandalorian will end its first season on Friday. What to do on cold winter nights while the waiting continues?

Is it all just gameshows and the twenty-four-hour news cycle? Well, if you love The Handmaid’s Tale here are a few other shows it might be time to look in to. You have the time to binge this holiday season, do it right.

10 Alias Grace

Did you start watching The Handmaid’s Tale because you read the book? Did you read the book because you are a huge Margaret Atwood fan? Then you are in luck. The Handmaid’s Tale is not the only Atwood book that is currently being translated to the small screen.

Alias Grace is a miniseries on Netflix based on a Margaret Atwood historical novel of the same name. The story follows the real-life 1843 murder of Thomas Kinnear and the later conviction of two of his servants, Grace Marks and James McDermott.

9 Mad Men

Did you start watching The Handmaid’s Tale because of star Elizabeth Moss? Well, Mad Men is Elizabeth Moss at her best once again. Moss has certainly made her presence known on a number of well-respected television shows. (Remember when she played the first daughter on The West Wing?)

The most recently honored was of course the now classic, Mad Men. This one offers a lot more episodes than Alias Grace, boasting seven full seasons from AMC. The show follows the antics of those working in advertising in the 1960s. Moss plays Peggy Olson, who rises from secretary to head copywriter.

8 Black Mirror

Did you start watching The Handmaid’s Tale because you love a dystopian story?

Then Black Mirror may be the perfect place to start your binging. The series is British and written in an anthology-style (meaning characters and scenarios from one episode do not translate into the next, think The Twilight Zone). With stories from synthetically recreating the dead and recreating everything you’ve seen, to the future of dating apps and reality television, there’s no one way for the future to go wrong.

7 Cleverman

The show is available on Netflix but originally hails from Australia. While The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on the possible dystopian plight of fertile females, Cleverman explores racism, in this case, focuses on a race called “Hairypeople” who also possess great strength, speed, and long life.

The show also stars Game of Thrones veteran, Iain Glen, as a successful businessman who is attempting to use the “Hairypeople” for his own nefarious gains.

6 Game of Thrones

If you like The Handmaid’s Tale then you obviously have a taste for high-quality television. There’s no higher quality than Game of Thrones out there. From the special effects to the acting and, aside from season eight, the writing is all top-notch.

The show also explores the abuse of women as well as the possibilities surrounding their rise to power. It also certainly helps that all eight seasons of the show have been completed. Game of Thrones can be enjoyed without suffering through pesky cliff hangers or waiting for later seasons.

5 The Man in the High Castle

Is The Handmaid’s Tale interesting to you because of the alternate history and future it highlights for the United States? Well, then Amazon’s, The Man in the High Castle should also be on your viewing list.

Based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name (Dick also wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on which Blade Runner is based) the story follows the fate of the United States should the Axis have won World War II. The United States is divided between Nazi Germany, taking most of the east, and the Japanese Empire, taking most of the west, with a buffer zone existing between the two powers.

4 For All Mankind

Again, alternate American history takes center stage in Apple TV + new series, For All Mankind, created by Ronald D. Moore, of Battlestar Galactica fame, the show asks the question of what history, and the space race, in particular, might have looked like had the Soviet Union beaten the United States to the moon.

For anyone interested in the changing role this might have created for women in the space race, the show goes into the specifics of how and why women might have become astronauts long before the 1980s.

3 The 100

Again, The 100 is a show on our list that explores a possible dystopian future for the planet. Due to nuclear radiation making the planet uninhabitable, the remaining human race has spent the last few generations on space stations.

The real story of The 100 begins when the powers that be decide to send 100 imprisoned teenagers down to the planet’s surface to see if it is inhabitable again after so many years. One certainly questions the morality behind sending minors on this particular mission, but dystopian worlds are all about questioning the morals and decisions of those who are holding the strings.

2 3%

As the story for The Handmaid’s Tale came from Canada (Margaret Atwood, after all, is Canadian) the 3% is a dystopian show on Netflix that comes from Brazil. In the not too distant future, most of the world’s population lives in poverty. Every year all 20-year-olds are allowed to enter “The Process” a series of tests they must pass so that they can leave poverty in “The Inland” and begin a prosperous and happy life in the utopia of “The Offshore”.

“The Cause” is the rebel group that exists in “The Inland” and wants to get rid of “The Process,” forcing the greater powers to focus on helping and building up the majority, rather than only regarding the 3%. Three seasons of the show are currently available, the fourth and final season is on its way.

1 Watchmen

Watchmen combines many of the aspects viewers of The Handmaid’s Tale love into a single program. Like the graphic novel that came before, Watchmen takes place in a U.S with an alternate history. For example, the USA won the Vietnam War.

It also looks at a less than utopian future, where superpowers are punished, racism exists in groups more powerful than the Klan ever was, and police officers wear masks for their own safety. Watchmen also takes as its lead a strong female protagonist, in police detective Angela Abar. Add all of this to the quality and financing HBO has to offer, what more could you want to see?

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