From left: Blessing Adedijo, Chase Infiniti and Kira Guloien in 'The Testaments.' Disney/Russ Martin Logo text A pickled fairy tale brined in the tears of teenage girls, The Testaments is different enough from The Handmaid’s Tale to be engaging, yet too exhaustingly connected to that series to stand as something truly distinctive and provocative.
I don’t think The Testaments is even watchable without having seen at least some of Handmaid’s, because despite extensive introductory text — “This story takes place in Gilead, a totalitarian regime that controlled most of the United States for a time” — and an entire pilot full of exposition, its stakes are completely tied to the Emmy-winning original. Meanwhile, for viewers who finished that Margaret Atwood-inspired drama last May, these 10 episodes are likely to generate responses ranging from “Wait, why are we still doing this exact same thing over again?” to “Well, at least this is brighter than the original.”
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The Testaments
The Bottom Line Periodically potent, frequently derivative. Airdate: Wednesday, April 8 (Hulu) Cast: Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday, Ann Dowd, Rowan Blanchard, Eva Foote, Amy Seimetz, Brad Alexander, Mabel Li, Isolde Ardies Creator: Bruce Miller, from the book by Margaret AtwoodThere are terrific performances here, from budding star Chase Infiniti, up-and-comers like Lucy Halliday and Mattea Conforti, and known commodities like Ann Dowd and Amy Seimetz. But there’s something creatively suffocated about The Testaments, from the endless references to events featured in The Handmaid’s Tale to the cameos by key Handmaid’s figures to the various recycled archetypes to 10 episodes spent withholding a revelation I’m convinced every single Handmaid’s viewer will have already guessed.
The Testaments (like The Handmaid’s Tale, adapted by Bruce Miller) begins some number of years after we left June Osborne vowing to bring Gilead down for good and beginning work on a memoir.
Instead, Gilead remains functionally intact.
Agnes (Infiniti) is the daughter of a relatively important and fairly wealthy Commander (Nate Corddry) and step-daughter to Paula (Seimetz). The latter is less of a mother to Agnes than Rosa (Kira Guloien), one of the household’s many Marthas (put-upon domestic servants).
Like most of her peers, Agnes follows her country’s various repressive edicts directed toward young women. She can’t read. She can’t write. She isn’t allowed access to calendars. She surely can’t look at boys or flirt with them, however dreamy her Guardian (Brad Alexander’s Garth).
Agnes attends a preparatory school run by Dowd’s Aunt Lydia, who watches over the daughters of Gilead’s elite both literally and in the form of a towering statue in the school’s atrium. Like the spoiled Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard), the decent-but-dim Hulda (Isolde Ardies), and her comparatively blue-collar — her dad is, shamefully, a DENTIST — best friend Becka (Conforti), Agnes is a “Plum.” That means she’s on a course of education to prepare her for wifely duties, but until she has her first period, she isn’t eligible for actual matrimony. Oh, and it means she wears a lot of purple, in contrast to the Pinks (the younger children who wear pink) and the Pearls (white-clad converts from outside of Gilead who have chosen to follow the nation’s zealotry, but boast uncertain futures).
Possibly as a punishment — punishments are, unsurprisingly, very important at Aunt Lydia’s school — or possibly because everybody looks to her as a role model, Agnes is asked to oversee the development of Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a Pearl from the heathen territory of Toronto determined to set aside her formerly wanton ways and start anew.
Daisy has an unrevealed agenda, though, and soon forces like none Gilead has faced before (other than in The Handmaid’s Tale) will change the place forever (or at least until the next sequel/spinoff).
If you like world-building that tells you, at every turn, that it’s building a fictional world, you’ll enjoy the 44-minute opening installment of The Testaments, narrated by Agnes with a thoroughness that leaves little to chance or interpretation (even if many of the details were already well-established, albeit from a different perspective, in The Handmaid’s Tale). Here, we’re told about the moral philosophy of Gilead, its festively color-coded social order, and the hopes and dreams of its population through the perspective of someone who views it all as aspirational — though it’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that Agnes will eventually begin to question the system that’s the only way of life she’s ever known.
In fact, she’s already begun to accumulate a purloined collection of trinkets found while gardening or wandering on the beach — relics of an earlier time, talismans she treasures without knowing what they actually are or do.
And if you’re thinking, “Wait, isn’t that just like Ariel in The Little Mermaid?” Yes, it is. I wasn’t extrapolating deeply when I called The Testaments a fairy tale; these girls all dream of meeting and marrying their respective Prince Charmings, a fantasy they know is at odds with reality, since if things go as planned, they’ll be married off — probably long before the age of majority — to Commanders who might be in their 50s or 60s.
If Donald Trump and his assault on reproductive freedoms were the specters that loomed over The Handmaid’s Tale from its streaming inception, it’s Trump’s Florida neighbor and frequent party companion Jeffrey Epstein who casts the biggest shadow over The Testaments. It’s no coincidence that what Aunt Lydia and the school’s instructors are doing is referred to as “grooming,” nor that the girls’ ages are fully elided. They’ve been raised to believe that the only delineation that matters between childhood and adulthood is the moment of menstruation, which fuels insecurity from the girls who have yet to achieve (or may never achieve) that milestone and is greeted with jubilation and invasive ceremony when it occurs. Half of the things Hulu has asked critics not to reveal relate to individual girls and their periods, or lacks thereof, as if The Testaments were a Judy Blume adaptation — think Under God’s Eye, It’s Me, Agnes.
Accompanied by a poppy, girl power-friendly soundtrack, The Testaments is a coming-of-age series composed of pieces that will be familiar to fans of the genre, with traces of Blume and Mean Girls and The Baby-Sitters Club and more. It all unfolds against the backdrop of the predatory men who think nothing of shopping for their latest bride at what is basically a middle-school dance, smiling and laughing all the way, a power structure composed of big bad wolves.
The Testaments is extremely queer-coded on a plot level, but that rarely comes through in the aesthetic, despite characters wearing purple. While The Handmaid’s Tale launched — thanks to director Reed Morano and cinematographer Colin Watkinson — with a look that resembled nothing else on TV, a dazzling deployment of light and color that felt purposeful in every frame, the first season of The Testaments has been bookended (episodes 1-3 and 10) by director Mike Barker. A regular director on Handmaid’s, Barker displays a sensibility here that is — other than offering some welcome brightness — not appreciably different from that of the earlier show. Thus a spinoff that should come across as younger, queerer and even more female-fronted than the original series is just another well-produced prestige drama.
It’s hard to see Seimetz, adding unexpected nuance to a character who is introduced as one-dimensionally villainous, in front of the camera without reflecting on her work as writer-director on Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience. That was a very different show about finding possibilities for liberation within a system of commodification of female bodies, but it’s tempting to think that The Testaments might have benefitted from Seimetz having more creative control here as well.
It’s likely not a coincidence that the middle of the season, directed by Quyen Tran, Jet Wilkinson and Shana Stein, has an intimacy that allows the characters to dominate the story instead of the story dominating the characters. There are enough traces of borderline camp here, enough elements of similarity to But I’m a Cheerleader and Bottoms, that I wondered multiple times how The Testaments would have played if Jamie Babbit or Emma Seligman had directed the opening installments. Better? Worse? Certainly different and probably fresher, without touching a word of the scripts.
Infiniti, who was the best thing about Apple’s Presumed Innocent before anchoring One Battle After Another, is mostly asked to simmer so far, as we watch the scales fall away from her often tear-filled eyes. (Don’t even get me started on the way the franchise has struggled to handle race in this world of nouveau slavery, making little of the potential that comes from having a biracial lead character in this context.)
Infiniti lets us in on Agnes’ mounting disillusionment in small doses hinting at pain and, possibly, rage (add Carrie to the underdeveloped influences). It’s clear that we’re going to have to wait until season two or three for that simmering to become a boil, though, so it’s up to Halliday, effectively projecting Lindsay Lohan/Kaitlyn Dever vibes, and Conforti, the lynchpin of the second half, to convey emotional volatility. Blanchard, providing depths beneath Shunammite’s catty one-liners, and Ardies, confirming the oddball energy she brought to Netflix’s Wayward, steal scenes.
It’s to Dowd’s credit that she makes Aunt Lydia compelling even though the character’s whiplash progression has always felt like the product of writers shuffling notecards more than anything organic. Playing freshly introduced Aunts working at Lydia’s school, both Mabel Li and Eva Foote have the requisite vulnerability beneath stern exteriors.
The strong middle of the season helps The Testaments overcome its repetitive and mechanical beginnings, building to a shocking (if not wholly earned) penultimate episode — that’s then undone by a return to the Handmaid’s Tale Redux predictability of the finale. There are elements of a show with new enough ideas to express throughout The Testaments, but so far the retread elements are winning.
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