Loved ‘The Testaments’? These Are the Shows to Watch Next If Gilead Still Has You Gripped

Hulu’s ‘The Testaments‘ arrived in April and immediately made its mark as one of the most compelling dystopian dramas in recent memory. Set four years after the finale of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ the series centers on young women who have grown up among the privileged class of Gilead and are being groomed to become the pious wives of the totalitarian regime’s most powerful men. It is bleak, it is beautiful, and it is exactly the kind of television that leaves a vacuum once the credits roll.

The series follows Agnes MacKenzie, brought to life by Chase Infiniti, and Daisy, portrayed by Lucy Halliday, two young women navigating an elite preparatory school where obedience is brutally enforced. What makes ‘The Testaments’ land is not just the dystopia but the human mess inside it, including the friendships, the moral grey zones, and the quiet rebellion that builds before it explodes. If that premise still has you hungry, these are the shows to add to your list immediately.

Where the Gilead Sequel Series Began

Before diving anywhere else, the most essential stop for any fan of ‘The Testaments’ is the show that built the world they are now inhabiting. In 2017, Hulu and Bruce Miller made a worthy adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ which ran for six seasons and concluded its story in April 2025. The series introduced June Osborne, a fertile woman stripped of her identity and forced into servitude inside the newly formed Republic of Gilead.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a 15-time Emmy Award-winning dystopian drama starring Elisabeth Moss, and it is the direct predecessor to the story playing out in ‘The Testaments.’ Moss reprises her role as June in the sequel series, which means arriving late to the original puts crucial emotional context firmly out of reach.

The stakes of Agnes and Daisy’s rebellion carry far more weight when viewers understand what June sacrificed to create even the smallest opening for resistance.

For six seasons, June Osborne guided audiences on a disturbing and often brutal journey inside Gilead, a society built on gender oppression under a totalitarian, theocratic regime that took over much of the United States and forced fertile women into a life of servitude as a means of countering declining births.

Streaming all six seasons on Hulu ahead of or alongside ‘The Testaments’ is not just a recommendation. It is a genuine requirement for full appreciation of what this expanding universe is building.

Dystopian Dramas About Women Fighting Back

‘The Power’ on Amazon Prime is arguably the most tonally satisfying companion piece for anyone who has spent time wishing the women of Gilead could fight back with something more than whispered resistance.

Adapted for the small screen from Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel by Alderman herself alongside Raelle Tucker, Claire Wilson, and Sarah Quintrell, the show tells a story of women across the world developing unnatural and extremely intense powers they can use against men, with teenage girls gaining the ability to electrically shock people using their fingertips.

With Toni Collette, Auliʻi Cravalho, John Leguizamo, and Toheeb Jimoh as members of the main cast, ‘The Power’ packs a lot of star power and tells Alderman’s fascinating speculative story perfectly. It is the kind of series that flips the premise of Gilead entirely on its axis, and the contrast makes watching them back to back feel almost cathartic.

Also worth immediate attention is ‘Alias Grace,’ a six-episode miniseries adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel by Sarah Polley. Directed by ‘American Psycho’ visionary Mary Harron, ‘Alias Grace’ centers around the titular Grace Marks, an accused murderer whose story is unraveled through the investigation of Dr. Simon Jordan, with the audience pushed and pulled in every direction as they try to understand what happened.

Though it operates in a historical register rather than a speculative future, it carries the same suffocating sense of women being defined and confined by the systems that surround them. It is a Canadian production crafted by CBC Entertainment, but it can be streamed stateside on Netflix.

The Coming-of-Age Oppressive Regime Playbook

‘The Testaments’ is, at its core, a coming-of-age story set inside a world designed to prevent growth. That very specific tension of a young woman waking up to the truth of the system she was born into is something ‘Silo’ on Apple TV+ handles with considerable skill.

‘Silo’ showcases a similarly oppressive regime that divides people based on class and skills, keeping residents in the dark about their reality and harboring plenty of secrets, with those in charge operating like a cult ruled by warped beliefs masked as protection for the people.

Rebecca Ferguson stars as Juliette, an engineer digging into the silo’s secrets in a story about humanity’s remnants living in a massive underground bunker while believing the surface is toxic. The slow-burn reveals and the way truth dismantles an entire worldview make ‘Silo’ feel spiritually adjacent to what Agnes and Daisy experience as their certainties begin to crack.

‘The Society,’ a Netflix series that sadly never made it past its first season, operates on a similar frequency from a completely different angle. In showrunner Christopher Keyser’s story, teens take control of a makeshift society in their town of West Ham, Connecticut after everyone else mysteriously vanishes, with protagonist Allie Pressman played by Kathryn Newton navigating impossible leadership alongside her friends.

‘The Society’ only made it for one season because the COVID-19 pandemic prevented it from picking cameras back up for a sophomore season, but throughout its ten episodes it is unbelievably fascinating to watch these teenagers try to keep their small society running.

More Essential Watches Beyond Gilead

For viewers drawn to the moral complexity and layered world-building of ‘The Testaments,’ HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ from 2019 is non-negotiable. Damon Lindelof, known for ‘Lost’ and ‘The Leftovers,’ revived ‘Watchmen’ with a limited series starring Regina King as Angela Abar, a detective with the Tulsa Police Department who is also a masked figure known as Sister Night, operating in a universe where a coordinated attack on the police force by a white supremacist group led to all officers being masked to protect their identities.

Across nine stunning episodes, Lindelof and directors including Nicole Kassell and Stephen Williams bring this sharp new story to life, with the series standing as a phenomenal dystopian drama packed with astounding performances and absolutely gorgeous storytelling. The show uses its speculative framework in exactly the way ‘The Testaments’ does, to say something urgent about power structures, inherited trauma, and the cost of resistance.

Variety described ‘The Testaments’ as “an exemplary follow-up to the original series” and “a magnificent coming-of-age story that draws terrifying parallels to the modern-day experiences of women living in a misogynistic society emboldened by religious psychosis.”

That is the bar these recommendations are measured against, and every title on this list clears it in its own distinct way. Which of these dystopian worlds are you planning to visit next, and do you think any of them come close to capturing the quiet dread that Agnes’s story delivers so masterfully?