"The Handmaid's Tale" star O-T Fagbenle reacts to Elisabeth Moss' Emmy snub for show's sixth and final season.
I had to laugh when I saw this. Variety running with O-T calling Moss’s Emmy snub a “tragedy,” as if the real tragedy of The Handmaid’s Tale’s final season wasn’t… you know… the actual final season.
Elisabeth Moss is insanely talented. Go back and watch her from Seasons 1–4 and she is absolutely magnetic. Raw, layered — she is June Osbourne/Offred in every frame.
But in Seasons 5 and 6? That spark was gone. The performance felt flatter, less embodied, almost like she was leaning on the same two or three faces over and over again. Maybe that’s the writing, maybe it’s fatigue, maybe it’s just the impossibility of salvaging a character they’d hollowed out, but the difference is undeniable. That’s not shade, it’s bewilderment, because we know what she’s capable of.
And that’s the thing: nothing about those last seasons was Emmy-worthy. The writing had collapsed into contradictions, the themes that once made the show dangerous and radical were sanded down, and even Moss couldn’t elevate it anymore.
The only reason I stayed engaged at all was Max Minghella. He was the one consistently bringing nuance, quiet intensity, and emotional weight. Anything that did still feel alive in Seasons 5 and 6 came from Nick Blaine. Max saved the scraps of this show.
So no, Emmy voters not nominating Moss isn’t the great injustice Variety wants to sell. The real tragedy is that the writers betrayed Atwood’s canon and buried the show’s feminist and emotional core.
And still no one in the writing room gets it.
Why we are mad.
