While some TV writers love focusing on their heroes, the opposite was true for “The Handmaid’s Tale” co-showrunner Yahlin Chang. For her, the fun was in writing the villains, who she felt had more humanity than the ones we see in real life.
Speaking on the Women Redefining the Future of TV panel, presented by Google TV at TheWrap’s 2025 Power Women Summit, presented by STARZ #TakeTheLead on Tuesday — alongside Shondaland creative partner Betsy Beers, “Nobody Wants This” star Justine Lupe, Google TV’s global head of go-to-market and content programming Lisa Siskind Bilgrei, and Sara Rea, the founder and CEO of Firefly Studios and former head of unscripted at Hello Sunshine — Chang explained that she always relished writing the commanders and those in charge of the fictional Gilead.
“I mean, actually, I have to say that our sort of villains on our show have more humanity and more complexity than the actual — it’s like, you couldn’t script what’s going on now,” she told moderator Raquel Calhoun. “Because you’d be like, ‘That’s so on the nose. That’s so ridiculous.’”
Yahlin Chang, Co-Showrunner, Executive Producer & Writer for "The Handmaid’s Tale" shares her interest in writing “people of ill will” in Gilead, unaware that it would reflect the political climate of today’s leaders.
— TheWrap (@TheWrap) December 2, 2025
“What’s bizarre is we would write these things and then they… pic.twitter.com/uyTeGbM0xu
What Chang found “bizarre” was that she and her team would write the story for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and then much of it would come to pass in real life.
“It’s always astonishing to me that as a woman, I have fewer rights now than I did when I started the goddamn show, you know?” she marveled. “So people always say, ‘Oh, wow. How did you have this — you made such a cautionary tale.’ And I always feel like saying, ‘Well, we obviously failed. We didn’t caution enough people.’”
“It was never meant to be like a prescription, you know?” Chang continued. “So it was always like, eerily true.”
Ironically, Chang noted, the challenge of a TV writer is always to make a fictional world seem real. So, as women continued to face challenges to their rights, the reality almost got too real for the series’ team.
“You started to realize that, oh, there is no end to how much people want to strip rights away from women, or how much people want to marginalize other people, or be cruel in order to enhance their own power,” she said.
“It turns out that those drives are really limitless, and it’s beyond what we could ever make up, for sure.”
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