Music supervisors of the world: Please band together and get us the entirety of Reputation (Taylor’s Version). On May 19, the penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale opened with an extended sequence set to “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor’s Version)” — which is notably not yet released. In the sequence, handmaid Offred/June (Elisabeth Moss) leads a group of handmaids to a getaway car before a bunch of bombs go off; then, after a title card, we see Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), holding her baby Noah, running through the woods after leaving Commander Wharton (Josh Charles). The song plays for a total of two verses and two choruses, cutting out right before we get to hear modern-day Swift say the words, “Sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh … because she’s dead!” Objectively, that is the right choice for the show, since there’s no way to take the sequence seriously with a spoken-word section, but how long do we have to wait to hear that rerecorded bridge?
“I’ve been wanting to use a Taylor song for many years on the show, and we finally found the perfect spot for a track from her, and I’m so glad we waited because there could not be a more perfect song for a more perfect moment,” Moss told Billboard on May 20. “Taylor has been such an inspiration to me personally. As a Swiftie myself, and I think I can speak for Yvonne and our entire cast as well, who are all Swifties, it’s such an honor to be able to use her music in the final episodes of our show.” Previously, in 2019, Swift praised Moss in a video E! showed the actress on the Golden Globes red carpet. “Hey, it’s Taylor,” she says. “I just wanted to do this video as a shout-out to Elisabeth and say thank you so much for saying in an interview that you listen to my music when you’re shooting Handmaid’s Tale because I’m a huge fan. I’m obsessed with the show.”
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This is the second track from Reputation (Taylor’s Version) to appear on a TV show, despite there being no confirmed release date for the album. The first was “Delicate (Taylor’s Version),” which appeared on episode six of season three of Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. Maybe the season finale of The Last of Us will finally get us “I Did Something Bad.”
