Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” has won multiple Emmys and Golden Globe awards over the course of six seasons. Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name, the series takes place in the dystopian Gilead, following the struggles of June Osborne, played powerfully by Elisabeth Moss. Showrunners and writers Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman recently talked with WPR’s “BETA” host Doug Gordon about the importance of following truth in storytelling and balancing the show’s penchant for cliffhangers with hard-earned fan service as the series comes to a close.

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Yahlin Chang: Gilead is now pretty much the entire continental United States, except for Alaska, Hawaii and the Republic of Texas. And what happened was an extremist, fundamentalist religious terror group called “The Sons of Jacob” took over the United States. They attacked Congress.

The government declared martial law. Everyone’s freedoms were stripped away, and as it was written in season one, there’s a line about how everyone was so distracted by their phones and they sort of didn’t even notice that this was happening until it was too late. Doug Gordon: And who is a handmaid in Gilead?

Eric Tuchman: A handmaid is one of the few fertile women. There’s been a fertility crisis in the world. And I guess you might say these unfortunate few women, who are considered fallen women by the Gilead people in power, become sexual slaves — surrogates for the men in power and their barren wives.

DG: And Eric, can you give us a recap on where things stand geopolitically in Gilead, Canada and what is left of the U.S. as season six opens? ET: As season six opens, Canada is now overwhelmed with refugees who’ve managed to escape Gilead. And even in Canada, they’re now getting kind of hostile and pushing back about this swarm of refugees.

So the Americans — what’s left of them — are really being squeezed. There’s not much place left for them to go. Some of them are trying desperately to get to Alaska or Hawaii because they’re not welcome in Canada anymore.

So the people who have been lucky enough to flee Gilead are now under a lot of pressure and stress. And within Gilead, there are still pockets of resistance. The underground, which we have named Mayday, is a group who are trying to find ways to tear down Gilead.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE – “Promotion” – June disrupts the rebels’ plans. Commander Lawrence gains power and influence. Hulu/Steve Wilkie DG: Yahlin, can you give us a little backstory for our favorite refugee rebels, June — played beautifully by Elisabeth Moss — her husband, Luke, and their friend, Moira?

How have they gotten to this point? YC: June was one of the unlucky few women who was still fertile, and she was made into a handmaid. Her daughter, Hannah, was ripped from her in the very opening moments of the pilot.

Hannah was taken and given to a commander and his wife, and June was forced into servitude as a handmaid. She had to bear children for Commander Waterford and his wife, Serena. The reason she was made into a handmaid was because she and her husband, Luke, began dating when he was still married.

So that was the excuse for her being a fallen woman. Luke, in season one, was able to escape to Canada, and at the end of season one, Moira, her best friend, also escaped to Canada. So her best friend and her husband are in Canada, and she does not escape to Canada until the middle of season four.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE – “Janine” – June and Moira go undercover. Serena and Nick make consequential choices. ELISABETH MOSS, O-T FAGBENLE.

Disney/Steve Wilkie At the end of season five, she was mowed over by car driven by a Gilead sympathizer. And Luke killed the guy. Because they are American refugees in Canada, and Canada has become increasingly hostile to them, they decide to leave on a train that is full of American refugees heading west.

June gets on the train with her baby daughter, Nichole, whom she gave birth to while in Gilead. Luke essentially gives himself up to be cops to distract them so that June and her daughter could escape on the train to what we realize is Alaska. THE HANDMAID’S TALE – “Train” – June and Serena’s journey takes an unexpected turn.

Moira makes a bold decision. Nick deals with a powerful visitor. YVONNE STRAHOVSKI, ELISABETH MOSS.

Disney/Steve Wilkie DG: Serena is also on the train with her infant son, Noah. Who is Serena and what is her relationship with June? ET: Serena was June’s mistress.

She was the infertile — we thought at the time — woman married to Commander Waterford, who was a very high level commander in Gilead. And Serena, when we first meet her in season one, is really kind of a brutal monster. She’s not happy with her situation.

Pre-Gilead, she’d been a very high-profile, influential woman who spoke out about traditional family values, traditional roles for women, they should be homemakers. She was very popular among Gilead supporters and very unpopular for the people who didn’t buy into what she was selling. And once Gilead started, what she didn’t realize is that she had created a prison for herself of her own making.

She was stripped of her voice and her influence, and she was just expected to shut up and follow orders. But as the series progresses, we see an evolution in Serena, where through her relationship with June, she opened her eyes more. And eventually, she, too, tried to flee the restrictions placed upon her in Gilead.

And that’s how, seasons later, we find her on that same train full of refugees desperately trying to get out of Gilead and be free with the son that she eventually gives birth to. DG: It’s sometimes easy to identify who’s good and who’s bad, but Serena is excellent at occupying the gray area in between. How important are the morally conflicted characters to telling this story?

YC: Those morally conflicted characters are not only so fun to write, but they are essential to telling the story because most people exist in this gray area between doing the absolute right and moral thing all the time and then acting out of selfishness or cowardice or fear. Given that we all exist on this spectrum, it’s extremely important to understand people who live in the moral grayness. Serena is really helped by Yvonne Strahovski‘s amazing performance.

She infuses humanity into every single thing she does, so much so that our viewers are like, “How can we feel bad for Serena? We know Serena is terrible! We know Serena has done terrible things!” THE HANDMAID’S TALE – “Exile” – June tries to settle in a new community.

Serena seeks a sanctuary. Luke and Moira take a big risk. YVONNE STRAHOVSKI.

Disney/Steve Wilkie But if you have a cardboard cutout villain, it doesn’t really teach you anything. You’re not going to be able to relate to that villain. You’re not going to learn anything.

You’re just going to think that person is completely evil and irredeemable. Whereas, characters who are more in the gray area, I think that we can learn from them in a way we can’t if the villain is just 100 percent evil all the time. DG: Given the source material of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel ran out after season one, can you tell us about building the larger story arc and when the events of season six came into focus for you?

ET: Margaret Atwood’s novel really remains our touchstone. It’s like our Bible for the show. We say it’s Margaret’s world and we’re all just living in it.

The book is beautiful, lyrical and very internal. So from the beginning, it was a challenge, because there’s not much plot in the story. In fact, when you look at the first season, most of the actual plot events happen in the first episode.

People say we used it up in the first season. Well, we didn’t. We used it up in the first episode!

What Margaret’s book has done for us, though, is every time we go back to it, there could be one sentence that inspires a whole story, a whole episode. And what she’s written is so rich and so deep that we continually go back and get inspired by what she’s created. But yes, moving forward from the book was exciting and it was intimidating sometimes.

But we trusted that if we followed the emotional truth of these characters — and especially June, what would be the next thing that would happen in real life for June? — we were always on safe ground. I mean, I was shocked in season four that June escaped.

I thought the escape would be the end of the series, and suddenly, in episode seven, which Yahlin wrote, which is one of the greatest episodes of the show, she’s in Canada. Who knew we’d have two and a half seasons of this character, free, to deal with? But that’s what’s so exciting and so motivating.

You discover things even you didn’t anticipate as a writer. DG: “The Handmaid’s Tale” has a knack for delivering gut-wrenching cliffhangers. How did you balance that with providing fan service as the series comes to a close?

YC: That’s a good question. We don’t sit down as writers and say, “OK, what’s going to be our cliffhanger?” We just sit down and try and follow the truth of our story and the truth of our characters. And because of the world that Margaret created, that leads us into some very precarious situations where you don’t know what’s going to happen.

And again, our characters are ordinary people and they’re living in this extraordinary time where there’s an authoritarian regime and there’s incredible uncertainty. And that means our story can take massive twists and turns because they’re living in a very unstable world. So I think that as we approached this season, knowing that this would be our last opportunity to tell these stories with these characters in this world, we had a wish list of what we wanted to see.

And it was now or never. This was our last chance to get the women of Gilead to rise up and to rebel, and for the handmaids to take back their power. We really wanted this season to be filled with hope and triumph and uplift because the show has been admittedly very dark.

And it was truthfully dark because it was a very dark world, and it’s terrible that an authoritarian regime took over America. And because of that, I think we have some very hard-earned and rewarding victories in this season. DG: What do you hope viewers take away from the final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale”?

ET: When I look back, I recognize that the show was dark and grim at times, but I really feel like the heart of the show is about hope. It’s about fighting back, resilience, courage, guts. It’s a survival story.

The legacy is: never give up, keep fighting for what’s right, for freedom and justice. I think it should be an inspirational message that people take from the show, not a dark and grim message.