SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Handmaid’s Tale (April 28, 9 p.m., CTV Drama Channel/Crave)
PHOTO CREDIT: Hulu/Bell Media
The handmaid is a renegade in Season 4 of this dystopian drama and one who doesn’t always feel on the side of the angels.
Viewers will likely find themselves vacillating between sympathy for and frustration with June Osborne, the handmaid of the title, played with the usual fervour by Elisabeth Moss, who also directed three episodes this season.
If you watched Season 3 — and if you didn’t, consider this your spoiler alert — you’ll recall that June was shot in the season finale, after she and a band of rebel handmaids were able to distract armed guards long enough for a plane carrying 86 children to take off for Toronto, striking a blow against the totalitarian regime of Gilead.
When Season 4 opens, June gets patched up enough for a network of Marthas to get her and the other handmaids out of Boston and to temporary safety at a farm overseen by teenaged wife Esther (Mckenna Grace, “Designated Survivor”), whose much older husband appears to have dementia — which comes in handy when there are a bunch of strange women running around the property.
Esther is a bit of a puzzle at first, fawning over June one moment, angrily bullying Janine (Madeline Brewer) the next for her reluctance to eat the pig that had to be slaughtered to feed all the extra mouths. It becomes clear that Esther is another traumatized victim who has suffered sexual violence sanctioned by the regime.
She gets a chance to take revenge against one of the men who violated her and the scene is emblematic of the ambivalence viewers may feel about this season. On the one hand, we’ve been waiting for the men who’ve enslaved the women of Gilead to get their comeuppance. On the other, June sanctions an act of savagery — which takes place off camera, but still — that seems to put her on an equal footing with the men who have tortured and executed women.
And yet, to deny women like June their revenge, even when the violence makes you squeamish, is to deny them their full humanity, which is what Gilead is all about. As June says in a later episode, “Why can’t we be as furious as we feel?”
June’s obsession with finding other members of the Mayday resistance and, ultimately, bringing down Gilead leads her to take risks that have serious, even fatal consequences for other people who depend on her. That’s made devastatingly clear at the end of Episode 3, which Moss directed. It’s one of the moments, and not the only one, in which it feels like June straddles the line between hero and villain.
During a virtual Q&A with members of the Television Critics Association in February, showrunner Bruce Miller said this season is about delivering on things that were set up in previous seasons and it does that, based on the eight of 10 episodes I screened, which take June out of Boston and beyond the control of Gilead, at least part of the time.
The later episodes also start to dig into the question of who people are when they’ve lived through something as traumatic as Gilead and whether a so-called “normal” life is even possible anymore under those circumstances. It’s a question that’s explored not just for June but for former handmaids Emily (Alexis Bledel), and Moira (Samira Wiley), and former “Martha” Rita (Canadian actor Amanda Brugel), all adjusting to life in Toronto and demonstrating that the path from victim to survivor is anything but linear.
Moss and her fellow actors continue to be brilliant this season. Brewer, in particular, really gets a chance to shine.
Viewers have found the series bleak and difficult to watch, and there isn’t much respite in the first half of the season. Some light starts to filter through in the later episodes, albeit still shaded with suffering.
This is necessary. It was time to, as Miller said in February, “make shit happen.”
Miller also said he feels like “I can go on and on forever” with the series, which to me seems like a dangerous impulse.
It’s time to let June achieve her goal and let Gilead fall. I can see one or two more seasons to conclude this handmaid’s tale. Anything beyond that would be indulgence.
Rutherford Falls (April 29, 8 p.m., Showcase/StackTV)
PHOTO CREDIT: Colleen Hayes/Peacock
If you like gentle comedy with a point to it you might want to spend some time in Rutherford Falls.
The show was co-created by Ed Helms and Michael Schur, who have applied their talents to beloved series like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation,” and Indigenous writer-producer Sierra Teller Ornelas (“Superstore”).
Helms also stars as nerdy Nathan Rutherford, whose raison d’etre is preserving the history of his family and, particularly, town founder Lawrence Rutherford. His best friend Reagan Wells (Lakota Sioux actor Jana Schmieding) is equally devoted to sharing the history of her fictional Minishonka First Nation and the two support each other in their lonely quests.
So far, so good, but then the town’s mayor (Dana L. Wilson) proposes moving Lawrence’s statue, known as Big Larry, from its spot in the middle of the main street — not out of a spirit of anti-colonialism, mind you, but because drivers keep crashing into it. Nathan’s zeal to keep Big Larry in the exact spot where Lawrence signed a “uniquely fair and honest deal” with the Minishonka 400 years earlier sets him on a collision course with local Minishonka residents and, eventually I suspect, with Reagan herself.
One also suspects that as the show goes on (I screened four of 10 episodes), Nathan will have to come to terms with the colonialism that he obliviously embraces.
He’s not the only one facing an identity crisis. Reagan is an outcast from her tribe, who see her as a sellout to white culture. Her boss, casino owner Terry Thomas, is devoted to the well-being of the tribe but tends to value its traditions as something to be monetized.
Terry is played by Michael Greyeyes, a Canadian actor from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, and he’s the real standout in the cast. Smart, ambitious and pragmatic, Terry is the most well-rounded character, at least from what I’ve seen so far, and Greyeyes lights up whatever scenes he’s in.
Nathan and Reagan don’t get much character development beyond their well-meaning devotion to their respective histories. Nor does Josh Carter (Dustin Milligan of “Schitt’s Creek”), the reporter who comes to town in search of a story and becomes a love interest for Reagan. The cast also includes non-binary actor Jesse Leigh as Nathan’s assistant Bobbie and Canadian Mohawk actor Kawennahere Devery Jacobs as Reagan’s cousin Jess.
It’s not laugh-out-loud comedy — at least it wasn’t for me — but the show has heart and things to say: about power and who gets to exercise it, and whose stories get to be told and by whom.
Catching a Serial Killer: Bruce McArthur (April 30, 9 p.m., Super Channel Fuse)
I’m not sure that having a Canadian entry in the ever growing true crime genre is actually something to celebrate, but this documentary takes a fairly thorough look at a notorious Toronto case.
Grandfather Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty in January 2019 to murdering eight men, whom he dismembered and buried mainly in large planters that he had access to as part of his landscaping business. The plea came more than eight years after the first victim went missing.
This doc, which has already aired on pay TV in the U.S., lays out the case chronologically from that first disappearance, of Skandaraj Navaratnam, to the eventual arrest and conviction of McArthur, which took place only after a white victim who was well known in the gay community disappeared (the other victims, aside from one homeless man, were all South Asian immigrants or refugees) and after two previous police interviews of McArthur.
The police actually get off pretty easily in the doc, far better than in a recent report that itemized serious flaws in their investigations. You can read more about that in this Toronto Star article by Wendy Gillis.
Gillis appears in the doc along with other journalists, two police detectives, former friends of McArthur’s, a criminologist and members of the gay community.
Of particular interest is an interview with John Doe, a man whom McArthur tried to strangle in his van in 2016. Police let McArthur go when he told them it was a “misunderstanding.” He went on to kill two more men, Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman, whose disappearance kick-started surveillance of McArthur.
One flaw in the doc is that we learn much more about McArthur than we do about his victims. That lack of attention unfortunately mirrors the lack of attention that allowed the disappearances of a group of gay men of colour to go unsolved for as long as they did.
Short Takes
Grace (April 27, BritBox)
If you’re running out of crime dramas to stream, this two-part series is worth adding to the rotation. Created by Russell Lewis, known for the addictive “Endeavour,” and based on the novels by Peter James, it stars John Simm (“Life on Mars,” “Doctor Who”) as disgraced detective Roy Grace, who in addition to being relegated to cold case files is still mourning the disappearance of his wife six years before. The series isn’t reinventing the wheel, but the episode I saw, about a groom-to-be who vanishes from his stag, has some clever twists, and Simm makes an engaging lead.
Headspace Guide to Sleep (April 28) and Pet Stars (April 30, both Netflix)
These two series seem particularly pandemic-appropriate given that COVID-19 has both done a number on sleep patterns and led to an increased focus on our animal companions. The first show purports to be a guide to better sleep, a joint project of Netflix and the Headspace meditation app that features animation and soothing narration by Eve Lewis Prieto. Each episode ends with a wind-down exercise meant to send you into slumber, but I watched in the middle of the day and skipped through that part so I can’t say if it works.
“Pet Stars” features Colleen Wilson and Melissa May Curtis of Los Angeles animal talent agency Pets on Q as they search out social media animal celebs. And that’s it really, but the animals are cute. OK, maybe not the ugly dogs in Episode 1, but still.
Netflix also debuts Yasuke (April 29), an anime series based on the real-life, 16th-century Black sumurai.
Odds and Ends
One of the shows I would have most liked to review for you is “Pose,” which debuts its third season May 2 at 10 p.m. on FX. Unfortunately, reviews are embargoed until tomorrow. Season 3 is set in 1994 and sees Blanca (MJ Rodriguez) in the thick of AIDS activism while Pray Tell (Billy Porter) deals with his alcoholism and Angel (Indya Moore) tries to move ahead with her wedding.
I didn’t watch enough of “The Mosquito Coast” (April 30, Apple TV Plus) to really review it, but I can say it combines family drama with TV thriller based on the pilot episode. It’s an adaptation of the 1981 novel by Paul Theroux, star Justin Theroux’s uncle.
Disney Plus debuts a prequel to the Oscar-winning “Soul” on April 30, “22 vs. Earth,” which explores what soul 22 (Tina Fey) has against life on our planet in a short film by Kevin Nolting.
Also on April 30, Amazon Prime Video releases the action film “Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse,” starring Michael B. Jordan of “Black Panther” and “Creed” as Navy SEAL John Kelly.
On the same day, CBC Gem has the documentary “The Donut King,” by Alice Gu, about the rise and fall of a Cambodian refugee who built a doughnut empire in America.
NOTE: The post on “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been altered because I felt there was more to say after finding time to screen all eight of the episodes made available to critics.
NOTE: The dates and times listed here reflect information provided to me and cross-checked where possible against broadcast and streaming schedules, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of series reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste.
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