Weaving The Handmaid’s Tale: Showrunners Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman on Finding Humanity in the Final Season

A passenger train slices through the night in the sixth and final season premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale, barreling toward an uncertain future. It’s as much a setup for the perils facing its characters as writing the show. 

“Every season, I feel like we start with a totally blank slate,” said showrunner and writer Yahlin Chang (Supergirl), who joined the Primetime Emmy–winning Hulu series in season two. “All we knew at the beginning of season five and the beginning of season six was what the very last scene of the show would be.” 

Naturally, Chang and showrunner Eric Tuchman (Beauty and the Beast, Kyle XY) kept that under wraps. (The series finale airs May 27.) But they’re happy to share how they’ve guided these characters toward the long-awaited finish line. 

“One of the things we definitely wanted to do this season was give every character his or her due … to make sure that every single character had an arc where they had a real journey,” Chang said.  

“A twisted love story” 

Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 award-winning novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian dramatic thriller where a totalitarian, theonomic government has turned the United States into Gilead, a nation where women have little to no rights. Separated from her husband, Luke, and daughter, Hannah, protagonist June Osborne (Elizabeth Moss, The Veil) is forced to become a red-robed “handmaid,” a woman ceremoniously raped to bear children.  

Initially assigned to Gilead Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes, Royal Kill List) and his wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski, Teacup), June has become a revolutionary. She’s found allies in an underground rebellion, reunited broken families, arranged escape for refugees—even killed Waterford. Meanwhile, Serena has enjoyed tangential power but realized this exploitative system respects her only so much. She and June continue to cross paths, winding up meeting aboard the train in the season five finale. 

In the season six opener, Serena finds a doctor aboard the train for June, who appears feverish and ill after June first tries to avoid her. 

“The June-Serena relationship is really the core relationship of the show,” said Tuchman, even though a love triangle developed among June, Luke (O-T Fagbenle, No Good Deed), and Nick (Max Minghella, Babylon), the Waterfords’ former bodyguard and father of June’s second child, Nichole.  

“It’s really a twisted love story, the two of them,” he said. “We started with the victim-abuser relationship, and it’s just evolved in a very complicated way over the course of the series, with June’s humanity igniting Serena’s humanity, but it’s never easy. … That’s something that June wrestles with until the end of the show. How could she possibly forgive this woman who helped her husband rape her? But that makes for an interesting dynamic for us as writers to explore.” 

Brainstorming and Boards of Index Cards 

Plotting the final season began much like the others, with the executive producers brainstorming over a few days before working with the writers’ room, still drawing on Atwood’s book as inspiration. “We just continued to go back and, even if it was one sentence in her book, extrapolate and build a whole story and, in some cases, a whole world that she’s just suggested,” Tuchman said. 

The writers went through every character first and beat out their arcs with index cards, building two character boards full of details. Then they spent weeks coming up with a bible for the season and figured out the story beats per episode, matching the character beats with story beats.  

“Inevitably, you end up as the season goes on just, like, throwing index cards [away]. You can’t get to that story. You can’t do this. And when we figured out what the budget was for each episode, then we had to throw out more index cards because we couldn’t afford it,” Chang said. “You always end up with more story than you can fit, which is good. The episodes feel really full.” 

Since the first Trump Administration, The Handmaid’s Tale has entered the zeitgeist, especially during protests surrounding reproductive freedom, such as during when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. “I still marvel at the fact that, like, I have fewer rights as a woman now than when I first joined the show,” Chang said. 

The show consults advisers who have worked in humanitarian crisis zones or dealt with refugees and victims of trauma to portray those experiences sensitively and accurately. Yet while the writers are “news junkies,” Tuchman said, “I can’t remember a time that we ever pulled directly from the headlines or saw an event and decided to write about it. We’re usually so ahead of what’s happening in the country, and it’s just uncanny that some of the things that we’ve created end up happening or resonate with what’s happening in the real world.” 

Instead, the show always springboards off its characters. “We imagine situations that would be created if you put people in charge who have no conscience and no compassion and are acting purely out of selfishness and cowardness. Then we make our story, and the real world catches up,” Chang said.  

Finding the Underlying Humanity 

As the protagonist, June has some “plot armor,” surviving a season five assassination attempt, among other dangers, but the writers work hard to make her emotional journey credible. That also applies to Serena, who started the final season on the run with her infant son, Noah, and feels conflicted between a safe, anonymous life and being a Gilead power player again. 

“We always say in the writers’ room, ‘Serena’s gonna Serena.’ … You want to change. You try to make changes, and try to become a different person and turn the page, but you are still who you are,” Chang said. “I feel like, as writers, our job actually is to humanize our characters, because dehumanizing them is how you end up with war, where you don’t see other human beings as human.” 

That’s partly why June sometimes finds humanity toward Serena in spite of herself. “They keep getting thrown into circumstances that put them together, and June cannot help—because she’s such a compassionate person—to feel responsible for Serena,” Tuchman said.  

It’s been gratifying to watch June transform from a relatable, ordinary woman over the years into a leader who not only wants to reunite with her husband and children but now also fights for others’ rights and freedoms. While the show can be bleak, June’s hopefulness is her salvation—and her creators’ too.  

“I think what keeps her real is we have shown her many times in the depths of despair and just completely beaten down and hopeless, only to pull herself together,” Tuchman said. “As writers, we also can’t just write about the darkness all the time and keep going ourselves. If we’re going to invest so much of our creativity into this character, we want her to be someone who inspires us. We want to infuse her with what we hope we would exhibit in those circumstances.”