Television

The television in the Commander's house is a tightly controlled instrument of state propaganda, serving as the household's sole window onto the outside world during the Ceremony evenings. It broadcasts a carefully curated stream of official news, military victories, and ideological programming, designed to manufacture consent and enforce the regime's narrative. For Offred, the television is a source of both desperate hope and profound disillusionment, a flickering portal through which she seeks hidden truths while knowing that what she sees may be entirely fabricated.

Role in the Household and the Ceremony

The television is a fixture of the Ceremony evenings, a ritual that Offred, Serena Joy, the Marthas, and Nick are all obliged to attend. Serena Joy, who controls the remote, habitually turns on the set while the household waits for the Commander. She clicks through the channels, past a male choir singing "Come to the Church in the Wildwood," past a preacher with shining dark eyes, past the blocked Montreal satellite station with its waves and colored zigzags, until she reaches the news. This is the one good thing about these evenings for Offred: she is allowed to watch the news. It seems to be an unspoken rule in the household that Serena Joy always lets them watch the news while they wait for the Commander, who is always late.

Content and Propaganda Function

The news that appears on the screen is a sanitized and triumphalist version of reality. It shows only victories, never defeats. The first reports are from the front lines, where the war seems to be going on in many places at once. Offred sees wooded hills from above, the trees a sickly yellow, as the voice-over describes the Angels of the Apocalypse, Fourth Division, smoking out a pocket of Baptist guerillas with air support from the Twenty-first Battalion of the Angels of Light. The screen shows two black helicopters with silver wings painted on the sides, and below them, a clump of trees explodes. A close-up follows of a prisoner with a stubbled and dirty face, flanked by two Angels in their neat black uniforms. He accepts a cigarette, puts it awkwardly to his lips with his bound hands, and gives a lopsided little grin. Offred looks into this man's eyes, trying to decide if the grin is a show of defiance or submission, or if he is simply embarrassed at having been caught. She even considers the possibility that he is an actor.

The anchorman who delivers this news is a kindly, fatherly figure with a tan, white hair, and candid eyes, like everybody's ideal grandfather. His level smile implies that everything he is telling them is for their own good. He promises peace and tells them to trust, to go to sleep like good children. Offred struggles against him, telling herself he is like an old movie star with false teeth and a face job, but at the same time she sways towards him, like one hypnotized, longing to believe. The anchorman then reports that an underground espionage ring has been cracked by a team of Eyes, working with an inside informant, and that five members of the heretical sect of Quakers have been arrested. Two of the Quakers appear onscreen, a man and a woman, looking terrified but trying to preserve some dignity. The man has a large dark mark on his forehead; the woman's veil has been torn off, and her hair falls in strands over her face. The broadcast also shows a city from the air, which used to be Detroit, with columns of smoke ascending from the skyline under the thunk of artillery. The anchorman then announces that the "Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule," with three thousand having arrived in National Homeland One and another two thousand in transit, though no pictures of this are shown.

Offred's Reception and Critique

Offred watches the news with a desperate hunger for any kind of information, even if it is false, because it must mean something. She is acutely aware that the news could be old clips or entirely faked, but she watches it anyway, hoping to be able to read beneath it. The television is a source of both hope and despair; it offers a glimpse of a world beyond her confinement, but that world is a carefully constructed lie. The propaganda is so effective that she finds herself swaying towards the anchorman, longing to believe his promises of peace, even as she knows she is being manipulated. The television thus becomes a symbol of the regime's power to shape reality and control thought, a tool that Offred cannot fully resist even as she recognizes its deceptions.

The novel's depiction of television as a tool of state control has been extended into the real world through the Hulu television adaptation, which premiered in 2017 and ran for six seasons until 2025. The series, produced by MGM Television and starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred, won eight Primetime Emmy Awards in its first season, including Outstanding Drama Series. Margaret Atwood served as consulting producer, ensuring the show's fidelity to the novel's themes. The adaptation's success and longevity—spanning seasons that premiered annually from 2017 to 2025, with production delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike—demonstrate how the novel's critique of mediated propaganda has resonated with contemporary audiences, turning the fictional television within the story into a meta-commentary on the power of visual media in the real world.