Is a second season of The Handmaid’s Tale necessary?

The Handmaid’s Tale will get a second season on Hulu, but is there a point to it considering the source material, or will the quality decline?

At this point, Hulu has only made the first four episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale‘s first season available for streaming. However, Deadline reported today that a second season has officially received the green light.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Just last week, Margaret Atwood spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the second season. Her wording, if you look closely, seems to effectively indicate that the second season was already planned. She even acknowledged that “more invention will have to take place.” However, she seems quite close to the production. Since The Handmaid’s Tale will have to do that much expansion, it seems wise to have her working with them.

(Mild spoilers for the first three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale follow.) The question is: what could a season 2 possibly show? Hulu’s series has already shown a tendency to go beyond Offred in the series. After all, we even learned Alexis Bledel’s character’s real name and saw what happened to her after her disappearance. Could Gilead start crumbling in the back half of season 1 itself? Or will the cracks in the society simply start to worsen? Deadline also specified that the series stars Elisabeth Moss. It seems fairly reasonable to conclude Offred will probably be return in season 2.

As for why Hulu decided to go for a second season, Deadline basically has that answer: it appears that the viewership for the premiere (unclear if that meant just the first episode or the first three) was bigger than anything Hulu’s ever done before. Although it doesn’t have a Netflix-style library of originals just yet, continuing with its most-popular series ever is probably a step in the right direction if the goal is to overtake Netflix.

Next: 5 key moments from The Handmaid's Tale episode 4

Hopefully the quality also stays the same.