This month brings an end to one of television’s most disturbing dystopias, says streaming columnist NICK OVERALL. 

Running for almost 10 years, The Handmaid’s Tale, on SBS On Demand, has carved itself out as a critical and cultural hit.

In 2017 it made history by becoming the first streaming-only series to win the Emmy for outstanding drama, television’s most coveted prize.

More telling though is how the iconography of the show has entered the public consciousness.

In real-life people have donned the red uniforms of the handmaids at protests for women’s rights, bringing new audiences to the show across the globe.

The show is based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, which tells the tale of a hypothetical future where America is split in half by a second civil war.

Amidst the chaos, a ruthless totalitarian society emerges and relegates the dwindling number of fertile women to child-bearing slavery.

Atwood’s book drew from real events and societies across history to imagine the Republic of Gilead, a brutal regime that uses fear to keep control of its people.

In turn, The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the heaviest and most unflinching shows on television. A single episode is enough to leave one emotionally drained, as it should, but in its final installment the creators say they want to end on a more “uplifting” note.

This is an intriguing choice when compared to the ending of Atwood’s book, which left readers with a haunting, open-ended question to ponder.

However, it is only the first season of the show follows the events of the book. Five additional seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale later has seen the series firmly go off in its own creative creation, albeit under Atwood’s light guidance as a “consulting producer”.

This has caused some fans to feel a sense of fatigue. It seems with season six, it’s definitely time to call it a day.

So much of how a story like this is remembered is how it ends.

A truly effective dystopian tale must satisfy audiences but also leave them with enough frightening ambiguity so that it lingers in the imagination long after its over. 

Perhaps no author achieved this balance more than Orwell, as evidenced by how commonly people still hear the year “1984” in their political diet.

Will The Handmaid’s Tale try to wrap things up in a more “uplifting” way as its creators suggest or are audiences merely being lured into a false sense of security that will be shattered?

This will be the show’s ultimate test.

NOW to switch tracks to a show so different it might just induce whiplash.

Netflix has added another hit to its reality TV canon with a new series called Million Dollar Secret.

What’s the gimmick this time?

In this show each contestant has a box in their bedroom and one of these boxes just so happens to contain one million dollars.

It is up to everyone else in the group to work out who has the big bucks so that they can vote them off.

The one person who does have the cash must protect their secret in order to take it home.

The concept has proven a winner, cracking Netflix’s top 10 shows last month. It is likely the platform’s answer to The Traitors, a reality series with a similar concept that has proven wildly popular in both the US and the UK.

Like that series, Million Dollar Secret is loaded up with plenty of big personalities that make for good TV. There’s no shortage of characters here that will expertly get on viewer’s nerves and suck in Instagram followers like a vortex.

But while they might be enjoying the glamour of appearing on television, they certainly have to avoid feeling like a million bucks, lest their fellow contestants vote them out and their chance at their cash.

This series has guilty pleasure written all over it, but for reality show fans subscribed to Netflix it’s undeniably some decent bang for buck.