The Testaments Disney+ Review: Is the Gilead Sequel Worth It?

The Testaments review in full: four episodes into Bruce Miller’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, we’ve got a clear enough read to tell you whether it’s earning its Wednesday slot on Disney+. The Testaments arrived in the UK on 8 April 2026 with a three-episode opener, Ann Dowd reprising Aunt Lydia, and the weight of nine years of fandom riding on its shoulders. A week later, Disney reported viewership had jumped 20% for episode four over the premiere. So an audience is there. The question for UK viewers still on the fence is whether the follow-up earns its slot, or whether it’s coasting on its predecessor’s goodwill.

The Testaments review: where and when to watch in the UK

The Testaments is a Disney+ exclusive in the UK, included on the Standard subscription from £5.99 a month and in the Premium tier at £12.99. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesdays at 8am UK time, with the full ten-episode run due to wrap in mid-June. The first three instalments were released as a block, which is becoming Disney+’s preferred launch template – Rivals and Say Nothing used the same approach last year. For a show with this much world-building to re-establish, that opening salvo matters more than it might for a breezier watch.

If you cancelled Disney+ after Shogun wrapped, you can resubscribe and watch the first three episodes immediately. There is no ad-supported tier in the UK yet, so the experience is the same either way.

The setup: Gilead, eight years on

The Testaments picks up roughly eight years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale finale. Offred is gone – we never actually see June – and the focus shifts onto three women at different points in Gilead’s pyramid of complicity.

Agnes (Chase Infiniti) is June’s eldest daughter Hannah, now a teenager raised by a Commander’s family who see her as one of their own. Daisy is a Canadian teenager whose arrival in Gilead upends the novel’s balance of power. Running the whole gilded prison, there’s Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), who has moved on from the Red Centre to preside over a finishing school for the daughters of Gilead’s elite.

If you never quite finished the last two seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, good news – the script reintroduces you to the regime through Daisy, who only knows Gilead from the safety of Toronto. It’s a neat trick. It also tells you exactly what kind of show this is going to be.

Ann Dowd: why she carries The Testaments review

There’s no gentle way to put this: Ann Dowd is the ballast that keeps The Testaments upright. Reading Atwood’s novel, you might have pictured a softer, more reflective Lydia – a woman reckoning quietly with her own monstrousness. The show is cannier than that. Dowd plays her as a true believer still fully armed, stitching together self-interest, pragmatism and a warped maternalism in a way that keeps you genuinely unsure whether you’re watching a redemption arc or a pre-emptive strike.

Every scene she’s in crackles. The ones she isn’t in sometimes don’t – and that’s the through-line of any honest The Testaments review. That isn’t a fatal flaw in a ten-episode season, but it does mean the show’s floor and its ceiling sit closer together than the original’s ever did.

The YA pivot, and why it mostly works

Before we get deeper into this The Testaments review, the loudest creative choice worth flagging is tone. The Testaments is lighter, brighter and more legibly young-adult than its parent series. The school setting invites comparisons to A Little Princess by way of Margaret Atwood, and the central bond between Agnes and Daisy carries the kind of slow-burn loyalty arc that anyone who’s watched a CW drama in the last twenty years will recognise.

Some critics have been sniffy about this, reading the new register as a dilution. I’d argue the opposite. Miller has lifted the boot off the viewer’s throat just enough to make room for character. The Handmaid’s Tale, particularly in its later seasons, had a habit of piling on suffering until the emotional signal flattened. The Testaments actually lets relationships breathe. That matters, because the whole premise hinges on whether a young woman raised inside the ideology can choose her way out of it.

It isn’t cosy, for the avoidance of doubt. There are still decaying bodies on gibbets and bloody punishments meted out in the schoolyard. But the colour palette, the framing and the pacing all suggest a show that wants you to keep watching rather than merely endure.

Pacing, structure and the middle-third problem

Four episodes into any The Testaments review, the one real structural concern is the classic ten-episode streaming drift. Episodes one through three hit hard. Episode four, the first standalone weekly, softens considerably – a lot of table-setting, a lot of Agnes staring out of windows, a lot of Daisy failing to explain why she’s really here.

The danger is the middle third. The Handmaid’s Tale had a recurring habit of stalling in episodes four to seven before gunning the engine for the finale, and early signs suggest The Testaments could inherit that weakness. The saving grace is that Lydia is a far better engine than late-stage Gilead set pieces ever were. If Miller trusts her scenes to carry the weight, the pacing will hold.

For UK viewers who like to marinate in dystopian fiction between Wednesday drops, our round-up of dystopian fiction books that predicted our modern world is a useful companion read.

How it stacks up against The Handmaid’s Tale

Every The Testaments review has to grapple with the easy shorthand – “The Handmaid’s Tale for teenagers” – is both true and unfair. True, because the protagonists are younger and the show is more willing to be a coming-of-age story. Unfair, because Atwood’s novel was always, at its core, about what’s transmitted between generations of women under a regime that depends on their complicity. The show honours that.

That said, it doesn’t yet match the scorched, claustrophobic power of the original’s first season. The series currently holds an 88% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels generous but not wrong – this is confidently made, well acted and thematically live, without quite clearing the bar of essential television.

If you want a comparison point on how sequel seasons can go wrong in the opposite direction – trying so hard to differentiate themselves they lose what worked – our Beef Season 2 review is a useful case study. The Testaments has the opposite problem. It’s playing it a shade too safe. That’s a fixable issue in a second season. It’s also, for the moment, what’s holding a solid show back from becoming a great one.

The Testaments review verdict: worth the Disney+ subscription?

If you lapsed your Disney+ account, the short answer to the The Testaments review question is yes: this is a reasonable reason to come back, especially at £5.99 a month. You’re getting Ann Dowd at full tilt, a cleanly constructed coming-of-age drama, and an evening’s worth of weekly water-cooler material that isn’t just another post-apocalyptic action show. Per the Disney+ UK press release, the series will run weekly through to mid-June, which is a pleasant counterweight to the binge-and-vanish model.

If you drifted away from The Handmaid’s Tale out of exhaustion, you may find the lighter register a relief rather than a betrayal. If you want something with more urgency, the sensible play is to wait four or five weeks and binge the middle episodes together – this show rewards patience more than it rewards week-to-week obsession.

Is it the generational follow-up the novel deserves? Not quite yet. Is it a confident, watchable, intermittently excellent piece of television? Yes – and in a spring schedule stuffed with remakes and reboots, that’s no small thing. For another streaming sequel that’s earned its keep this year, it’s worth comparing notes with our look at The Boys Season 5.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with: four episodes in, is The Testaments earning its spot in your Wednesday night rotation, or have you already drifted back to whatever else is on BBC iPlayer?