Being encouraged to recognise your own brilliance can prove a cruel lesson when the person doing the encouraging preferred you when that brilliance remained safely beneath theirs. That uncomfortable contradiction sits at the centre of Niki Byrne’s The Julia Set, an academically minded coming-of-age drama that doesn’t rewrite the formula but finds enough intelligence and…
Few fictional worlds have embedded themselves into the cultural consciousness quite like The Handmaid’s Tale. In the decades since Margaret Atwood first published her landmark novel, Gilead has become shorthand for a very real kind of fear – one that has only felt more immediate with time. So when she released The Testaments more than…
Few television worlds have felt as fully realized – or as suffocating – as Gilead, the theocratic regime at the heart of The Handmaid’s Tale. But with The Testaments, showrunner Bruce Miller isn’t simply returning to that world – he’s reframing it entirely. Based on Margaret Atwood’s sequel novel, the series shifts perspective to a…
