Note: This article contains light spoilers.
If nothing scares you more than the prospect of getting trapped in a patriarchal dystopia, then you’ll be hard pressed to find an hour of television more harrowing than the recent series premiere of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Hulu’s adaptation of the classic Margaret Atwood novel thrusts viewers into Gilead, a society built overnight atop contemporary America, where women known as “handmaids” are imprisoned in the homes of powerful men, raped on a routine basis and forced to bear their attackers’ children—all in the name of religion. But the premiere ends on a note of resilience: “I intend to survive,” says Offred (Elisabeth Moss), the show’s handmaid heroine. As the credits roll, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” starts to play.
The sync feels so on-the-nose, it changes the tone of the episode. Like Atwood’s book, the show has a visceral impact because it relies on characters’ everyday words and experiences, rather than preachy political rhetoric, to convey the horror of their predicament. No one needs to explain what’s wrong with Gilead—it’s apparent. So there’s a moment of dissonance when we reach the end of the premiere and hear Gore, in her teasing lilt, beg some man, “Just let me be myself/That’s all I ask of you.” The song has become a bit of a girl-power cliché, and the choice to give it such prominent placement at the end of the premiere reeks of condescension, like an explanatory postscript for a book fully comprehensible without one.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” might be this year’s most important TV show. Its depiction of how authoritarianism can creep up on a complacent populus is haunting and, unfortunately, timely. The performances (by Samira Wiley and Alexis Bledel as well as Moss) are subtle and heartbreaking. Forced into communicating solely through religious platitudes by a regime that is always watching them, the handmaids often express one sentiment with their mouths and another with their eyes. But something isn’t quite right about the soundtrack, despite the praise it’s begun to garner. At a moment when no prestige TV series is complete without smart music supervision, “The Handmaid’s Tale” uses pop music in a way that’s more often clunky than inspired.
The problem isn’t clutter. So many ambitious dramas—from “Mr. Robot” to “The Leftovers”—load up their soundtracks with recognizable songs, but “The Handmaid’s Tale” is often quiet. Its most important conversations are conducted at a whisper. No theme music accompanies the bold, red-and-white titles of its brief opening credits. The sound design is impeccable, from the pleasant tap of wooden Scrabble tiles insinuating a hint of sensuality into a forbidden board game, to the obscene creak of a bed frame underlining the grotesqueness of a rape that the victim must placidly endure. Adam Taylor’s score, which Lakeshore Records will release this week with a soundtrack album notably free of any pop songs from the show, hits all the right emotional beats. Violins grow progressively louder during tense scenes, drones denote ominous plot developments, and angelic choruses emerge when some holy act of cruelty is being committed.
Only two or three pop songs appear in each episode. Some of them drive home the disparity between Offred’s old life and her dreary existence in Gilead. There’s a glimmer of dark humor in the choice to set the flashback that opens the fourth episode—Offred’s quasi-hallucinatory memory of her family at a carnival—to the Monkees’ saccharine “Daydream Believer.” At times, these cues serve as a potent reminder of the trauma she’s survived. SBTRKT’s slinky “Wildfire,” with vocals by Little Dragon, is well suited to a laid-back party scene from Offred and her best friend Moira’s (Wiley) college years. Bookended in the premiere by shots of the pair’s reunion at the “Red Center,” where new handmaids are subjected to a brutal re-education process, the carefree track also lightly underscores how much they’ve lost since they last saw each other.
But the show overplays its hand when another electro-pop anthem, Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away,” blasts through Offred’s earbuds as she and Moira finish a jog together in a flashback from episode three. It’s a gloriously filthy song that is always a delight to encounter in the wild. In the context of an episode that also includes a surprise clitorectomy, though, it becomes a screed on women’s sexual agency that feels simultaneously didactic and redundant.
Towards the end of that same episode, the worst sync so far of the 10-part first season arrives. As the military begins firing on protesters in the early days of Gilead, we hear Debbie Harry singing “Heart of Glass.” This ghostly rendition of Blondie’s most famous song, which slows way down and replaces the giddy disco beat with somber strings, turns out to be DaftBeatles’ “Crabtree Remix”: a mash-up of Harry’s vocals with a Philip Glass violin concerto. The images on the screen and the lovelorn lyrics that accompany them are totally mismatched, and not in a way that feels purposeful. (A Bustle writer’s insistence that the sync makes you “feel the love between citizen and government breaking down” seems like a stretch.) But this isn’t just a non sequitur—it’s also the kind of moment that sends you reaching for your phone to figure out what the hell you’re hearing. “Heart of Glass” takes over the scene. It’s a shame because the song adds nothing to visuals that would be striking without it.
Great music supervision doesn’t have to be subtle. By the time viewers finished binge-watching “Stranger Things,” they’d probably heard the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” a dozen times and duly noted its relevance to a little boy trapped between two planes of existence. One of the best music moments in TV history came at the end of “Friday Night Lights’” first season, when Tony Lucca’s cover of Daniel Johnston’s paranoid “Devil Town” played over shots of a football victory parade, instantly transforming a triumphant scene into a dark omen. Just about every episode of “Mad Men” featured a scene-stealing sync that left mouths hanging open. The show’s A-list music supervisor, Alexandra Patsavas, was particularly adept at closing episodes with songs that stung. Don Draper walked away from his wife’s commercial set and chatted up another woman, in the season five finale, to the strains of Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice.” The James Bond theme was both a comment on Don’s similar brand of womanizing masculinity and a sad reference to his compulsion to keep reinventing himself.
Sometimes, it seems like “The Handmaid’s Tale” is attempting to emulate this sly, witty style of music supervision. Like the premiere, the second episode ends with a showy sync: Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” When the song kicks in, Offred is enjoying a rare surge of empowerment. A moment later, she’s discovered that her confidante Ofglen (Bledel) has disappeared. With its breezy melody and pleading lyrics, the song is presumably supposed to mirror that transition from confidence to uncertainty—and twist the knife with its over-the-top cheerfulness. But “Don’t You” is such a conspicuous hit, and its smooth, ‘80s synth-pop sound feels so out of place on the show, it becomes as distracting as “You Don’t Own Me.” A Jay Reatard sync (“Waiting for Something”) at the end of episode three doesn’t detract as much from the narrative, though it does feel a touch callous to pair an emotional scene where Ofglen realizes she’s been operated on without her consent with a bratty punk song.
What separates “The Handmaid’s Tale” from TV series that get music supervision right is its lack of an overarching musical aesthetic. While “Mad Men” and “Stranger Things” limit themselves to songs from the eras when they take place, many shows set in the present, like “Girls” and “Master of None,” pull tracks that seem to reflect their characters’ tastes. WGN period-drama “Underground,” now in its strong second season, takes a big risk by pairing current pop and R&B with the adventures of escaped slaves in the mid-19th century, and its anachronistic, high-energy soundtrack often infuses historical storylines with vitality. “Mr. Robot” has a disorientingly eclectic approach to music supervision, but its aural collages feel like poetic representations of its protagonist’s mental chaos.
Four episodes in, “The Handmaid’s Tale” can’t quite decide whether it wants a soundtrack that is earnest and feminist, or one that is clever and ironic. No one seems to have put much thought into the effect deploying a big hit (or a remix of a big hit) can have on a scene, or what it means to juxtapose so many different styles and eras of pop music in a single show. Taken together, the syncs feel more like placeholders than complete thoughts. For a series that has gone to such trouble to make its chilling world feel real, it’s a puzzling oversight.