A TV show that replicated the book’s poetic compression, its formal strangeness, would be hard to pull off. But the Hulu adaptation doesn’t try. Instead, it is heavy-handed in the best way, dramatizing Offred’s claustrophobia through gorgeous tableaux of repression. It makes everything blunter and more explicit, almost pulpy at times; among other things, we learn Offred’s true name, June, right away. She tells us, “I intend to survive.” The first three episodes, directed by Reed Morano, sketch Gilead’s outlines. There’s the opulent mansion in which Offred (Elisabeth Moss) is fed like a prize pig, overseen by the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), a former televangelist; the wall where traitors are hanged; and the grim dorm where older women torture and tutor. Offred’s narration retains some of her wit and fury. But the emphasis is visual, making violence as beautiful as a nightmare: red dress, blue dress, white sheets, black van.

The third episode is a chilling showpiece, dramatizing Gilead’s tilt from liberal democracy into fascism, nimbly shifting from intimate scenes to grand ones, making one form of drama frame the other. There’s a graceful moment in the apartment June shares with her husband, Luke, as she, Moira, and Luke bicker in the aftermath of significant political events: the women’s money has been drained, their jobs taken away. All the characters feel like real people; their dialogue is unhurried. It’s a scene about power—Luke now has all of it—but it doesn’t grandstand. Yet this intimate moment is bracketed by deliberately operatic, even bombastic gestures. In a parallel sequence, a lesbian Handmaid named Ofglen (played, silently, by the terrific Alexis Bledel) is gagged and kidnapped by the Secret Police, forced to see her lover hanged, and then given a clitoridectomy. In the end, Ofglen stands in her white hospital room, in shock, reaching into her medical stockings for the bandage on her crotch. It’s a scene out of a Cronenberg film: abstract, grotesque. And yet the two scenes complement and intensify each other. The show doesn’t try to replicate the near-pointillist density of the book, but at its best it manages to suggest something of its allegorical weight, its recognition of the futility of trying to separate the personal from the political.

Some of the smartest moments in the show—like Ofglen’s story, and one featuring a Handmaid named Janine—are radical edits from the book, making a passive plot active. Other changes, however well-meaning, muddy the message. In the book, Gilead is a white-supremacist culture. In the show, black actors play Moira and Luke. The result is an odd trade-off: we get brown faces, but the society is unconvincingly color-blind, as if race had never existed.

There’s a more unsettling change, however, which only fully crystallizes in the fourth episode. Most of that hour is a sharp exploration of Offred’s airless circumstances: she plays Scrabble; she flirts with Nick; her doctor offers to impregnate her. And then, in flashback, we learn about a failed escape, after which Offred was beaten on the soles of her feet. So far, so grim—“Game of Thrones” grim. The final sequence is a montage. As tinkly music plays, we see Offred on her bed, healing. One by one, other Handmaids place gifts by her pillow. Then we’re back in the current day, where she walks the streets side by side with fellow-Handmaids. In red, they glide, in slo-mo, their habits blooming against the dull street. The scenario is familiar to anyone who has seen a Tarantino film or “The Craft”: the storm gathering, the team uniting. June’s internal monologue adopts the defiance of a Nike ad: “We are Handmaids. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches.”

That go-girl moment made me sit up straight—and pull back. I could feel it being hashtagged, like “she persisted.” The book is never inspiring, not explicitly. Offred is a witness, not a heroine. She’s often ashamed and numb. She’s even a little cold. It’s painful for her to remember her daughter, but her drive isn’t to find her family; it’s to stay sane. Her thoughts about Luke are complex, too: she suspects that when her power receded he liked it, a little. At one point, Offred finds herself desperate to do needlepoint, thinking of paintings that she’d seen, of harems and concubines. They were meant to be erotic, she realizes, but they actually depicted women waiting, being bored. “Maybe boredom is erotic,” she thinks. “When women do it, for men.”

A television show, especially one that intends to run many seasons, can’t bore. And so, inevitably, the stakes are raised. The characters of Serena Joy and the Commander are played by sexy actors, expanding the potential for love triangles. Offred gets a more overt goal: to find her family. A few episodes in, we leave Offred’s perspective. There’s an episode for Serena Joy, who, like Mellie on “Scandal” or Claire on “House of Cards,” is softened by a backstory; then we visit Luke, a brave rebel up in Canada. Step by step, you feel the show mining Offred’s story for something that’s more aspirational, less psychological; less horror, more thriller. There are still many pungent scenes. But the icky, idiosyncratic force of Morano’s early episodes dims slightly, as the show hints at a more conventional path: “Escape from Gilead.” Maybe this move is inevitable; it might succeed. But there’s something lost along the way—the special beauty of a bleak ending. On television, that’s no longer impossible. (Just look at “Happy Valley” or “American Horror Story.”) But it can’t happen here.

The sexual politics of 1985 survive today only in distorted form, reordered like Scrabble tiles. Our President is a Playboy-brash predator; his Vice-President is pure Gilead. The anti-porn movement is as dead as the Shakers; naked photos are practically second-date etiquette. In pop culture, the eighties are often portrayed as cartoonishly sexist: “Well, it was the eighties, after all,” goes the excuse. It’s like the fifties, if you lived in the eighties. Atwood’s story may now be an artifact about an artifact, but it retains its great power as a reminder of the thin tissue between the past and the present. ♦