I guess a book series is out there somewhere.

It’s a challenge for the series (as it was for Volker Schlöndorff’s underrated 1990 film of the novel) to make it clear that the impregnation ceremony involving the Commander, the Handmaid, and the Commander’s Wife is a rape masquerading as a religious ritual and not soft-core group sex. As the camera focuses on Offred’s face, Moss registers alienation, horror, fear, grief—and resignation. Should it matter that the Commander is played by the handsome Joseph Fiennes? I’m not suggesting that it’s less odious to have nonconsensual sex with a man who looks like a movie star. But one can’t help thinking that we are watching something quite different, something more glamorized, than we would be were the Commander a troll.

Clearly, this represents a considered commercial decision. In an interview with Business Week, the showrunner, Bruce Miller, explained why the Commander and his wife have been made much younger and more attractive than their counterparts in Atwood’s novel and Schlöndorff’s film:

I felt that it was a more active dynamic if Serena Joy [the Commander’s Wife] felt like this person was usurping her role not only as the reproductive object of the house but gradually taking away the wifely duties, the intimate duties, the romantic, sexual duties… The two of them together, you feel like, “I’d love to see them go toe-to-toe in a cage match.”

Others may feel less eager to watch two women brawl in a cage, but it’s inarguably sexy: the face-off between the warm-hearted slave girl and the ice-cold-princess wife. The tensions between the lovely female rivals provide a frisson of soap-operatic melodrama, though their scenes together more frequently make one imagine a Mad Men episode in which Peggy (also Elisabeth Moss) battles Don Draper’s blond wife Betty, played by January Jones—whom Yvonne Strahovksi strongly resembles.

Perhaps I would have liked the series more if I’d sprung for the costlier Hulu subscription, the one without ads. As it was, the rebellious Handmaid getting her right eye gouged out and the lesbian Handmaid (in Gilead speak, a “gender traitor”) forced to watch her lover hanged were periodically interrupted by commercials for cars, Wells Fargo, whiskey, and, oddly, the Marines. I also wish I hadn’t seen, in late April, on the University of Southern California campus, two rows of women costumed in the Handmaids’ red robes and white bonnets, standing silently on the walkway—a spooky but effective promotional stunt for the series. Obviously, a great deal of money has been invested in producing and advertising the show, because someone hopes to make even more money from a stylish depiction of what women might be forced to endure if things get really bad.

Ultimately, Offred’s determination and grit make the series more heartening and inspiring: more feminist, one might say. But before Offred can demonstrate that grit, too many women’s fingers and hands have been lopped off as punishment for the crime of reading. To claim that Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale is feminist TV is like saying that bullfighting is an intentional defense of animal rights—because there is always a slim chance that, in the end, the bull may prevail.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.