For a show that can’t escape the term “prescient,” it’s fitting that one critic knew exactly what would doom “The Handmaid’s Tale” before anyone else even knew it was doomed. Not me, of course. I would never claim such credit even if I deserved it. But in her 2017 review of the first season, New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum (who won the Pulitzer Prize just a year earlier) framed her critique in the sturdy housing of history.

She starts off noting the adaptation’s “grotesque timeliness,” arriving just a few months into Trump’s first term, while also noting how many other critics have noted the same thing. So she shifts gears, appraising the American landscape that received Margaret Atwood’s esteemed book: “Just a decade earlier,” Nussbaum writes, “a woman could be denied a credit card without a man to co-sign, and yet, by 1985, when the novel was written,...