Contrarian Culture Club recommendations

All-dystopia edition!

The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)

When The Handmaid’s Tale premiered on Hulu in April 2017, Donald Trump was a few months into his first term in the White House. At a time when the implications of Hillary Clinton’s loss were quickly becoming clear, the dystopian series, set in a near future in which the United States has been commandeered by a theocratic regime that enslaves fertile women, felt eerily relevant.

Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel—which was, in turn, inspired by the rise of the religious right in the Reagan era—the drama captured the fear and rage felt by many women during the first Trump era. The distinctive handmaid costume (red cloak, white bonnet) became a fixture at protests, including demonstrations against Brett Kavanaugh, and a potent symbol of the #MeToo movement. In a sign of the times, The Handmaid’s Tale became the first streaming series to win the Emmy for drama series.

The show has only grown more relevant in the eight years since its debut, which can sometimes make it a difficult watch. The Jan. 6 insurrection, the Dobbs decision stripping women of their reproductive rights, the stories of women dying from pregnancy complications because of new restrictions—all made it seem as if we were steadily approaching a real-life version of Gilead. The series returned to Hulu this week for its sixth and final season, as Trump is settling into his second term in office and doing his best to dismantle the federal government.

Depending on your appetite for fictional dystopias given our present circumstances, it’s either the best or the worst time for the show to wind down. The final stretch of episodes finds former handmaid June (Elisabeth Moss) fleeing for the west while attempting to rescue her daughter, still trapped in Gilead. It also features increased tension between Canada and its neighbors to the South. (Sound familiar?) The season has been described as relatively optimistic, but in The Handmaid’s Tale, the bar is pretty low. Production also recently began on The Testaments, an adaptation of Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning follow-up. In other words: the nightmare continues. At least on TV.

Black Mirror (Netflix)

Also returning to TV this week is the anthology series Black Mirror, now in its seventh season, which offers a very different—though no less familiar—version of dystopia. Like a Twilight Zone for the digital era, each episode of Black Mirror tells a discrete story about the role of technology and the mass media in our lives. The genre and tone vary dramatically, from sci-fi to psychological thriller to the darkest of satire, but include similar themes about data, surveillance, and consumerism. Created by Charlie Brooker, the British writer who is also behind the brilliant Philomena Cunk mockumentaries, Black Mirror is frequently grim but the standalone style of each episode can make it more palatable: you know you won’t have to linger for too long. And, hey, there will probably be some good guest stars. (It’s attracted increasingly well-known stars in step with its explosion in popularity.)

The new season includes a standout episode called “Common People,” starring Rashida Jones as a woman who nearly dies from a brain injury but is saved by an experimental new subscription service that connects the damaged portion of her brain to a cellular-style network. It works, at least initially, but she and her husband (Chris O’Dowd) struggle to afford the constant service upgrades required to keep her healthy. As a commentary on both our healthcare system and the services that are constantly pushing us to pay more for less—like, ahem, Netflix—it’s devastating. In the also excellent “Hotel Reverie,” Issa Rae plays a Hollywood star who signs up for a remake of a classic film being made with troublingly effective AI technology.

Meredith Blake is the Culture Columnist for The Contrarian

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Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Before diving into the latest dystopian Barnes & Noble blockbuster, let's get one thing straight: Suzanne Collins ≠ Susan Collins, the ever-concerned Republican Senator from Maine. (Though her ability to capitulate to wannabe dictators would serve her well as a Capitol citizen in Panem.)

Sunrise on the Reaping is the fifth and latest installment of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series. Set 24 years before the first book’s events, Sunrise follows Haymich Abernathy, the whiskey-soaked mentor of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark in the original series. The story begins during Haymich’s own reaping for the 50th Hunger Games, a brutal Quarter Quell with a horrifying twist: Double the contestants, double the number of innocent children slaughtered for the Capitol’s twisted spectacle. Of course, if you go into this book at all familiar with the original trilogy, there’s not a lot of anxiety surrounding how the games will end. However, Collins is less interested in the story’s outcome. Instead, she focuses on rooting readers deep into the dystopian hellscape citizens of Panem had grown accustomed to. And as for the requisite unyielding tension readers expect from the series, that comes in the anticipation and waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it does, Collins rubs salt in the wound…then adds lemon juice.

Sunrise pulls no punches with its social critique. It’s arguably the darkest of the novels to date, and also the most rebellious. Collins lays bare the power of propaganda and the ruthless lengths dictators go to in the quest to silence perceived threats—hmm…any parallels to our current state of affairs there? Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. Collins plants seeds of hope, showing how even those with the most power have their share of weak points (arguably, they have more than most).

A harrowing and tragic page-turner with revolutionary kindling itching to catch light, I highly recommend this book. Cinephiles, fear not: a film adaptation is already in the works, set for release in late 2026.

Ellie Kurlander