Bruce Miller makes oppressive societies feel lived in by keeping close to the people trapped inside them. We value that patient attention, though The Testaments finds him asking for more time than the story needs.
Fi1m perspective
Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia remains unsettling in The Testaments (2026), though the Gilead around her is increasingly familiar. Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday make the shift to a younger generation worth following. Miller’s series is good, but ten episodes is at least three too many for the story it has. We grew impatient around the halfway mark because so much of the world-building covered things we had seen before. The actors keep us watching when the writing should be doing more of that work.
ER (1994), for which Miller wrote between 2002 and 2004, offers an earlier example of characters made interesting by the demands placed upon them. Its hospital work feels difficult and its people remain fallible, though that is an ensemble achievement we would not assign to one writer. He later wrote and co-executive-produced The 100 (2014), moving into post-apocalyptic drama. Creating The Handmaid’s Tale (2017) was the decisive turn towards adapting Margaret Atwood. Elisabeth Moss worked with him as actor and producer, with Atwood involved as author and consultant.
Miller’s preference is to stay close to what one woman can see and know, then gradually expand the world around her. He favours detailed settings, with an ordered, attractive surface that makes the cruelty underneath more disturbing. His strength as an adapter is preserving a novel’s tone while allowing its characters to develop over a longer stretch of television. The Testaments shows why that stretch still needs a limit.
Miller stepped down as showrunner for the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale to develop The Testaments. Working with Stuti Malhotra and a large writing team, he adapts Atwood’s sequel novel while continuing the television story. Moving on a generation is the right decision, and the new leads give the writing something fresh to attend to. That makes it a worthwhile continuation for those interested in Gilead, despite the stretches of repetition.
Biography
Bruce Miller is an American television writer and producer. He began his career writing for ER (1994) in the early 2000s and went on to write and produce episodes of series including Everwood (2002), Medium (2005), Eureka (2006), Alphas (2011) and The 100 (2014).
Miller created and served as showrunner for The Handmaid's Tale (2017), for which he received the 2017 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series; the series was the first on a streaming platform to win the former award. He also won a Golden Globe for the show. He is the creator of the upcoming series The Testaments (2026), based on Margaret Atwood's novel and continuing from The Handmaid's Tale.
