“ The Handmaid’s Tale ”, “Hacks” and “Doctor Who”, are back on television this week: NPR

Every week, the NPR television critic, Eric Deggans, writes on what he is watching. Read the column last week here.

This is obvious: given the controversial movements of President Donald Trump to limit abortion services, consolidate power in executive power, target diversity programs and align his administration with conservative Christian ideas, it may be difficult for some people to watch this new final season of Hulu’s The history of the servant.

Some Trump adversaries, when they criticize their policies, make open references to the Hulu show – which dramatizes the Apocalyptic novel by Margaret Atwood of the same name on a brutally repressive theocratic government grasping the control of a large part of the United States. In this world, women are second -class citizens; Many of those who are capable of carrying children are forced to sexual slavery such as “servants” – permeated by the country’s leaders in a dehumanizing ritual.

For its sixth and last season, which is doing its debut on Tuesday, the Hulu version of The history of the servant Shows Gilead’s theocracy lounging in military success and highlighting a new community designed to offer a space where women can have some additional rights, aimed at convincing the world to facilitate its opposition.

The history of the servant broadcast its previous season in 2022, resonating with a very different real political atmosphere. In the show, the former servant of Elisabeth Moss, June Osborne, lived as a refugee in Canada, trying to survive Gilead’s attempts to assassinate him. In the last episode, while driving in Sanctuary in Alaska, June discovered that she was in the same train car as Serena Joy Waterford by Yvonne Strahovski – the former wife of an official who raped her like a servant.

The new season resumes at that time, exploring the idea of ​​knowing if someone so traumatized can or should forgive someone who played a big role in writing this trauma. Indeed, a large part of the last season of the show focuses on the themes that regular viewers will know well: does revenge harm the researcher as much as the target? Love can we bridge the fundamental differences between two people on questions of social responsibility and survival? Is it wise to continue fighting when your opponent seems to contain all the cards?

The history of the servant is another series that requires viewers to see calamities such as slavery, refugees fleeing violence and repression against immigration through various objectives. In this last series of episodes, Canada loses patience with the American refugees it lowers. Given the current geopolitical tensions between the United States and Canada, and the real fate of certain immigrants looking for asylum in the United States of Latin American countries, these scenarios offer more than one allegory to real events.

During its sixth season, the series has difficulty setting up on a new identity for Moss’ June, who has transformed during several seasons of someone who tries to survive a brutal world to a rebel contesting the system, then an angry revenge researcher. Now, she is forced to reconsider all these ideas when the ancient enemies become uncomfortable allies. Moss herself has also made a trip that you can see in the narration of the series – winning two Emmy Awards as a star and producer, as well as the realization of episodes.

There are times when The history of the servant Can always feel like an apocalyptic soap opera, with June and his courageous band of rebels which awaits a head start on their authoritarian enemies in a way that often seems too impossible.

But there is also asking if there could be a way to build trembling alliances with people ready to retreat from extremism and to consider a different path. Which can be the closest thing to a conciliation message that our turbulent time can provide.

What do I look at another

Hacks

Returns Thursday for his fourth season on Max

This comedy winner of an Emmy has already conquered Hollywood with her story of an aging comic strip that managed to succeed with his writer Frenemy in the late 1920s. So why not take up a real challenge in his fourth season: save Telk Talk-shows at the end of the evening? For his new season, Deborah Vance Chafes by Jean Smart, was sung at Jean Smart’s tab after being sung in the hiring of her writer, Hannah Einbinder, Ava Daniels, as editor for a series of late evening.

As per usual, Hacks The best shines when he focused on the friction between these two, in contradiction, because neither can admit how their narcissism and their implaingability constantly undermines a relationship that works for both – when they have left it. The regular cast is also clear, surmounted by the co-creator Paul W. Downs, who also plays Jimmy, director of Ava and Deborah. But can this crew overcome their dysfunction to triumph in a genre that has given names like Taylor Tomlinson and James Corden? It’s going to be very fun to watch them try.

Your friends and neighbors

Beginning Friday on Apple TV +

Only an actor as skillful as Jon Hamm – who built glory by making us worry about the greatest narcissist on television, Mad MenDon Draper – could also make the public care about a guy who could be the greatest stupid of television at the moment, Andrew “Coop” Cooper. Forced to leave her well -paid job as a healing fund manager, Cooper is a divorced father of the debt who decides to maintain his high -end lifestyle by depriving the McMancans of neighbors in his East Côte East Silver Enclave. It takes a while to exceed the obvious parts of the descending spiral of Coop – the empty hypocrisy of the excesses of its rich friends, the hollow self -centeredness which leads to his life of crime, and more. But while history goes from social satire to a thorny and thorny legal drama, this show begins to prove why it is worthy of the attention of viewers.

Doctor Who

Returns on Saturday for its second season renamed on Disney +

As a long-standing fan of “Whovian”, it was fun to see this classic British science fiction reset to be reset again from last year with the black star, thirty years old, Ncuti Gatwa, returned the Showrunner Russell T. Davies, a budget stimulated by an alliance with Disney and a renewed creative sense. Fans know that the show has been reinventing itself since its beginnings in 1963, and the Gatwa version of the time to travel in time of the show, the universe -galavant Time Lord – simply known as the Doctor – is more building and more fun than certain previous iterations. However, while the series welcomes a new human companion for him in Belinda Chandra, Steel Health Profession of Varada Sethu, there is a throbbing feeling that they have not completely nailed a distinct vision of this new doctor, now responsible for saving Chandra from an extraterrestrial deadly cyber intelligence that extends over decades.