Handmaid’s Tale reaps 20 Emmy nods

Executive producer and writer Bruce Miller and his cast and crew were saying “Praise be” – figuratively, at least – on Thursday as the The Handmaid’s Tale reaped 20 Emmy nods, up seven from last year, when the show took the prize for best drama series. Not surprisingly, the show’s star, last year’s best actress Elisabeth Moss, was nominated again, as were seven other actors in supporting or guest roles.

One of them, Samira Wiley, learned of her Emmy nod onstage as she announced other nominees. Wiley called the show’s big haul “a real graduation” from the year before. And she had high praise for Moss. “Elisabeth makes everyone who she’s in a scene with a better actor,” she said. “And I can speak personally about that. I don’t know how she does what she does.”

Miller, nominated as a writer as well as executive producer of the dystopian sci-fi drama, noted that while many viewers have drawn parallels with real-world current events, he tries to keep the focus on the show’s main character, Moss’ June, and her world in Gilead.

“You want to be in the world, so you know when you do a show and talk about people being separated from their children, what that’s going to mean to people in the world,” he said. “We’re all news junkies, political junkies, but I think we really try to think about what happens to June and what happens in Gilead, and really make that work, and then you have the chance that people apply it to their life today.” The best guide, he said, has been the writing of Margaret Atwood – the Canadian author of the 1985 novel on which the series is based.