The Handmaid's Tale is a brutal, gripping and worryingly pertinent series we're impatiently waiting for the return of. So with season two on the horizon, it's time to start thinking beyond that – like, way beyond that.

Because showrunner Bruce Miller has revealed that he's planning on a 10-season arc for the hit Hulu series, and that's just thanks to Margaret Atwood's source material.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Miller admitted he sees "a world beyond" the current timeline but insisted the show had not deviated from the groundbreaking novel that inspired it.

"I would watch an episode about the Nuremberg trials after Gilead falls. There are lots of worlds you think of...where everything has changed so much.

Channel 4

Related: Elisabeth Moss hints at "inspiring" and "gut-wrenching" Handmaid's Tale season 2 after Golden Globes win

"But my arc is still very much the arc of the novel, which is the arc of this one woman's experience in Gilead at this time, and her recollections that paint this picture of what it was like and what the experience of this world was like, which really is still the book," he explained.

Promising fans that any series, whether it's 10 seasons long or not, will not go beyond the novel, Miller said: "People talk about how we're beyond the book, but we're not really.

Hulu

"The book starts, then jumps 200 years with an academic discussion at the end of it, about what's happened in those intervening 200 years. It's maybe handled in an outline, but it's still there in Margaret's novel."

He added: "We're just covering territory she covered quickly, a bit more slowly."

Season two of The Handmaid's Tale will have a stronger focus on the lives of the rebels, both in the present timeline and in the time before the Gilead regime took power, and will pick up from season one with a pregnant Offred (Elisabeth Moss) being smuggled out of Gilead.

The Handmaid's Tale returns to Hulu in the US on April 25. Details about the UK return date to Channel 4 are TBC.

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