Drama highlights ugliness of tyranny

One line in “The Handmaid’s Tale” not only summarizes a central theme of the story but also explains why the series will make audiences shudder.

“This may not feel ordinary to you now,” the tyrannical Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) tells a young woman trained to be a breeding slave to an infertile couple, “but in time, it will. This will become ordinary.”

The drama, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, is available today on the streaming service Hulu.

The series stars Elisabeth Moss as Offred, one of the few fertile women in a dystopian near-future in which the United States is now a totalitarian state governed with neopuritanical rigidity and religious absolutism.

Years of environmental abuse have made most of the population infertile, save for a few women who are enslaved to married couples as human broodmares.

Before being captured and sent to live with Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his steely wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), Offred had another name, a husband (O. T. Fagbenle) and an 8-year-old daughter.

As a handmaid, she has learned to be subservient and invisible in the household, until her services are needed.

In time, Offred and fellow handmaid Ofglen (Alexis Bledel) open up to each other, but friendships and candor are risky in the halflives of handmaids.

Oppression prompts different reactions among its victims.

Moira (Samira Wiley), one of Offred’s friends from “before,” and other handmaids plot their escape and, in some cases, rebellion.

Janine (Madeline Brewer) is defiant from the start, which only earns physical punishment from Aunt Lydia.

Creator Bruce Miller has both preserved the fundamental focus of Atwood’s novel and opened the lens wider so that its message resonates even more specifically for a 21st-century audience.