Tara Ward watches the return of The Handmaid’s Tale and discovers the dystopia of the future now feels all too real.

If you like your television so bleak that you need to curl into a ball and rock back and forward afterwards, then clear the floor because I have great news. As White Lotus sails into the sunset and Severance delivers its final jaw-dropping twist, three more award-winning blockbuster series – The Handmaid’s Tale (Neon), Black Mirror (Netflix) and The Last of Us (Neon, from Monday) – return this week. While each series tells its own unique story, they all take place in an unsettling futuristic dystopia that feels more and more like our real world every day.

The Handmaid’s Tale is the first cab off the grim TV rank, returning for its sixth and final season. The show pushed the boundaries of believability in recent seasons, as our hero June survived tragedy after tragedy: abuse, assault, imprisonment, torture, being run over, being shot at, escaping a warzone in a milk tanker. Through it all, we’ve kept the faith that June’s suffering will eventually be rewarded with some kind of resolution – a little bit of peace, a little bit of happiness. Even a good night’s sleep would do the trick.

But as season six begins, it seems we’ll have to wait a little longer for our happy-ish ending. We rejoin June (the always impressive Elizabeth Moss) and daughter Nichole on a refugee train bound for the safety of Vancouver, with June bumping into old mate Serena Waterford in the same carriage. Canada is growing weary of dealing with American refugees, but across the border in Gilead, the American army is in trouble. Gilead may well win the war, and Commander Lawrence is keeping himself busy by building his New Bethlehem community. Don’t worry, it’s a new and improved dystopia, one where the women are actually allowed to read and write.

Episode one features an unexpected (and welcome) reunion, but the first two episodes suggest The Handmaid’s Tale is doing nothing new in its final hurrah. It’s the same nightmare, different day for June, as she escapes danger, then goes running back into it. She’s reunited with the people she loves, then leaves them again. There’s more of June’s silent stony looks into the camera and infuriating, self-destructive decisions, but the drama feels a lot less startling compared to the hellish events of previous seasons.

That could be a deliberate choice. When The Handmaid’s Tale started in 2017, we were three months into Trump’s first presidency. The dark totalitarian world of Gilead was a warning to us, and part of the show’s appeal was watching June burn those horrors to the ground. In 2025, the flames aren’t fast enough. We’re three months into a second Trump presidency, we’ve seen the diminishing of reproductive rights, the start of a trade war, a climate emergency, and more. Eight years after the show began, The Handmaid’s Tale’s grim dystopia of the future now feels all too present.

That’s the challenge facing TV shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror and The Last of Us in 2025: how can they offer us an escape from reality, when their stories feel like our real lives? How do you get people invested in a fictional TV show, when it feels like you’re watching the news? It’s something Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker was mindful of in his new season, which he says features less dystopia. “If you want that, there’s a 24-hour panel showing it called your window,” Booker told The Guardian. “You don’t necessarily want to see something saying: things are going to get worse.”

Despite the unease, the darkness (seriously, can somebody turn some lights on in The Handmaid’s Tale so I can see what’s happening on the screen?) and the relentless misery, I still have hope, just like June. It’s the characters who keep us coming back for more, and after eight arduous years of watching brave, flawed June stick it to the man, I’m going to stick with her. I need to know if she finds her daughter Hannah, or if she’ll be reunited with Luke and Moira, or if Aunt Lydia will ever get off her treadmill.

Consider this my own stony-faced look down the barrel of the camera. We’ll never let the bastards grind us down.

Watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Neon.