Catch up with writer Jacey Heldrich ’08 ahead of the show’s sixth and final season.
Recently, from her California living room, Jacey Heldrich ’08 learned how to make IEDs and other explosive devices.
Don’t worry: She isn’t planning on practically applying this knowledge that she learned through Google searches and YouTube videos. But a character on the Emmy Award–winning TV series The Handmaid’s Tale likely will.
As a writer for the show — which enters its sixth and final season next year — Heldrich has to learn the practical knowledge behind such heinous acts of violence, so characters’ actions are believable to the show’s growing audience. “You have to create that emotional experience,” she says.
To make the show seem realistic, and to nail its dystopian genre, she and her writing team also take inspiration from world events. Then, they pen the worst-case scenario of those times, revealing consequences that could affect society in the long term. This model comes straight from writer Margaret Atwood, who structured much of the novel on which the show is based around the 1970s Iranian revolution and the rise of conservative Christianity during the Reagan administration.
Heldrich doesn’t have to time travel that far back to find material for each plot point. In the show, women are stripped of their reproductive rights and are seen as surrogates in an authoritarian government. In America today, access to abortion and contraceptive care are being hotly contested in court — something that happens in the show’s flashback scenes.
“It’s hard because the show has been very emotional given everything that’s happening in the world,” Heldrich says, especially in regard to recent watershed moments in the abortion rights debate.
For example, when supporting character Janine becomes pregnant in a flashback during season four, she timidly enters a pregnancy crisis center where anti-abortion employees attempt to convince her to keep her baby. The aim of the episode was to show the lengths people seeking abortions have to go to receive adequate care. “Everything was cribbed from documentaries, from interviews, from YouTube videos where girls go undercover at these crisis pregnancy centers and record what’s said to them,” Heldrich told Vulture last year.
Writing for a post-apocalyptic drama that deals with themes like rape, violence, and death isn’t easy, and it can be a more emotional process than other TV shows, she says. Rather than watching TV at the end of a long day, Heldrich will spend time with her young daughter, who reminds her that there’s a world outside of Gilead, the fictional hellscape at the center of the show.
The Colgate English major had been working as a television assistant for five years when she arrived at The Handmaid’s Tale’s writing department. She started out assisting the writers of the show by joining the group as they outlined the program’s episodes and season as a whole. “I was really lucky to land on Handmaid’s Tale when I did, because the television assistant track is something that’s been pretty entrenched as a way for people to break into professionally,” Heldrich says.
Soon, she had the opportunity to flex her own writing muscles. “Witness” (season three, episode 10) planted the seeds for how the third season would ultimately end. The episode performed so well that Heldrich earned herself a spot as a writer on seasons 4–6. It’s an impressive feat, considering that the move to shorter TV seasons makes writing opportunities even more competitive because there are fewer episodes to work on.
In the meantime, Heldrich will continue learning how to make bombs.
In 2022 Heldrich and other writers for The Handmaid’s Tale were nominated for a Writers Guild of America award for their work on season five.