Something very different
HBO’s ‘The Regime’ takes chances — and risks failure
I was disappointed in the first episode of “The Regime,” HBO’s prestige six-episode series that stars Kate Winslet as the authoritarian leader of a fictional central European country that is apparently rich in cobalt reserves. That said, it is in the nature of first episodes to be disappointing and I plan on watching the second episode this Sunday.
This isn’t really a review because I’m watching it in real time, as a civilian, without the benefit of the three or four advance episodes streaming services typically provide critics. Still, “The Regime” is a series with some promising elements, chief among them an interesting pedigree.
The show was conceived by Will Tracy, co-writer of the underrated 2022 black comedy “The Menu” and one of the writers on “Succession”; his “Menu” co-writer Seth Reiss is credited as an executive producer on “The Regime.” Frank Rich, an executive producer on “Succession” and on the delightfully vicious HBO political satire “Veep” — is also an executive producer on this show.
I used to think this Frank Rich was not to be confused with the Frank Rich who earned the sobriquet “The Butcher of Broadway” as the chief theater critic for The New York Times from from 1980 to 1993, then moved on to become an op-ed columnist for the newspaper from 1994 to 2011, but they are the same person. Rich is an astute media critic and still writes essays on politics and culture for New York magazine. It is depressing to think about Rich’s career trajectory, even if no one is really sure what an executive producer does.
Tracey Seaward is the third and final executive producer of the series, and we can understand why she associated with the project when we realize she produced a series of films with venerable director Stephen Frears in the first decade of the 21st century: “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002), “Mrs. Henderson Presents” (2005), “The Queen” (2006), “Chéri” (2009) and “Tamara Drewe” (2010). Sir Stephen — he was knighted in 2023 — directs three of the six episodes of “The Regime”; the other three are directed by New Zealand director Jessica Hobbs, who has worked extensively in British television since the mid-’90s, directing episodes of “The Crown,” “Broadchurch” and the Stellan Skarsgård-Lesley Manville police procedural “River” from 2015.
Aside from Winslet, the cast is stocked with canny choices; Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts (2011’s “Bullhead,” Thomas Vinterberg’s 2015 production of “Far from the Madding Crowd”) plays a brutish soldier (who I suspect will come to have a Rasputin-like hold over Winslet’s psychologi
cally fragile Chancellor Elena Vernham); Hugh Grant (who didn’t appear in the first episode) appears as the former chancellor Edward Keplinger, a liberal who was ousted seven years prior to the series’ present day; and the always interesting Andrea Riseborough.
Riseborough is best known for garnering a Best Actress Academy Award nomination in 2023 for her work in a very small independent film called “To Leslie,” a drama based on the true story of an alcoholic single mother in west Texas who wins $190,000 in the lottery and squanders it on liquor and drugs. She ends up destitute, eventually moving in with her 19-year-old son. While the film’s distributor did not have the budget for a conventional advertising-driven “for your consideration” awards campaign, director Michael Morris embarked on a guerilla-style “celebrity-backed campaign” to get Riseborough nominated.
Morris and his wife, actor Mary McCormick, basically contacted friends and colleagues in the entertainment industry, asking them to watch the movie, and if they liked it, to spread the word among others. The result was that dozens of fancy people saw the film and made posts about it on social media, and Riseborough wound up with a nomination.
This led to speculation that the Academy would rescind Riseborough’s nomination on the grounds that the campaign violated their rules against directly lobbying voters. Eventually they concluded that the nomination would stand, and Michelle Yeoh went on to win the Oscar for her role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
But Riseborough’s nomination speaks to how well regarded she is among peers; she’s often referred to a as “chameleon” (which sometimes only means an actor isn’t heavily botoxed) and an actor’s actor. She does tend to disappear into roles — I had to check the credits to make sure she was playing Agnes, the drabbily attired hyper-efficient head of the palace staff and mother of young Oskar (Louie Mynett), who Chancellor Elena creepily “co-parents.”
Riseborough also appeared in Scottish writer-director Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film “The Death of Stalin,” a blackly funny satire based on a graphic novel by French authors Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. Iannucci was also the prime creative engine behind “Veep,” which seems a clear antecedent to “The Regime.”
Iannucci in “Stalin,” “Veep,” and his brilliant 2009 film “In the Loop,” a fictionalized farce about the run-up to the Iraq War, tends to use cinema verite techniques to create a kind of hyper-reality.
While “The Regime” might not feel as naturalistic as Iannucci’s political satires — there is a hint of Wes Anderson in the wistful symmetry of its set design (the establishing shot of the palace looks like something out of “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), but there is, in the series’ snappy, vicious and often profane repartee, more than an echo of its HBO antecedents “Veep” and “Succession.”
First episodes are necessarily place setters, and “The Regime” sets up promisingly.
Winslet’s Elena is a paranoid and flamboyant dictator of a Republic in Name Only, the title cards tell us, in “Middle Europe.” (The country is not named, which lends the proceeding the flavor of an Orwellian fable, and might remind those of a certain age of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian “Brazil” from 1985.)
Elena is needy and a psychologically fragile narcissist who communicates with the people she rules via New Age-y videos in which she affirms her love for them; there is an intimation that she served as a social media-friendly front for her more competent but less camera-ready father, a hardline right winger whose body — he died a year before the events of the first episode unfold — lies in state, in a glass mausoleum in the palace.
As with Lenin’s body in Red Square, Elena’s father’s body (Finbar Lynch, who will likely appear in flashback in subsequent episodes) is plagued by the appearance of dark spots, with which the embalmers of RINO struggle to cope. (The Russians periodically use a solution of acetic acid and ethyl alcohol diluted with water on the spots that appear on Lenin’s face and hands. Every year his remains are soaked in a solution of glycerol and potassium acetate. They had to replace the eyes with glass fakes.)
When Elena confers with her father, her tone is not entirely respectful — she notes the flowers she has brought to lay on his tomb are, like him, dead. (“Something in common. Much to talk about.”)
We learn that, like her father, she was a physician before ascending to power, and that she met her French husband Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne) and eventually, lured him away from his wife and family. As he says, Elena generally gets what she wants.
The best scene in the first episode had Elena entering a state dinner where she plans to discuss allowing America access to her country’s cobalt reserves. But, as preamble, she takes the stage (with husband Nicholas on keyboards) to perform a wonderfully awful version of Chicago’s already treacly 1976 hit “If You Leave Me Now.”
While Winslet is an accomplished singer — she sang in many earlier films and recorded the theme song for 2001’s animated “Christmas Carol: The Movie” — she delivers an overwrought version of the song that, while it starts out OK, wanders distressingly off-key.
This works because it establishes the character’s self-delusion as well as her naked need for validation from her citizen-subjects (with whom, we understand, she never has any direct contact). This is because Elena is an obsessive hypochondriac who believes (apparently without basis) that the palace is infected with toxic mold. She needs constant updates on the humidity in the rooms she occupies, which leads to the employment of a soldier, Corporal Hubert Zubak (Schoenaerts), as her “personal water diviner.”
Zubak’s “job,” such as it is, is to walk ahead of Elena with a hygrometer, periodically reading off humidity levels, his eyes cast down, in a posture of submission.
The volatile Zubak has recently played a role in subduing a protest with deadly force, actions that caused him to be tagged as one of the “butchers of Site Five.” He’s plagued with PTSD and consumed by guilt, which leads him to occasionally engage in self-harming rituals like a self-flagellating monk. But in their first meeting, Elena offers him absolution: “It’s not nice what they’re calling you. There’s a good man in there who deserves love.”
Elena also sees him as representative of the little people, and possibly a useful adviser on what the little people really want. She urges him to cultivate “a graceful mind.” This seemingly earns her the brute’s undying loyalty, though when he inadvertently embarrasses her she turns on him. It’s only through the mediating influence of Elena’s ministers — who sniff at Zubak and call him “The Butcher” but nevertheless retain some connection to reality — that saves him from banishment or worse. His new job is to patrol the hallways of the palace in the wee hours of the morning, waving his hygrometer where no one will ever see him.
Then there’s a situation that requires the action of a rough man.
Zubak intervenes and “saves” Elena (though it’s unclear whether she was in danger), thereby earning him her devotion. He’s the only one willing to talk truth, to tell her that her proposed deal with the Americans makes her look weak.
Schoenaerts is one of my favorite actors; a seemingly massive man (it’s hard to tell with actors unless you see them in person; when I met Forrest Whitaker, I was disappointed to discover I was slighter taller and heavier than he was) with the capacity for conveying both tender brooding intelligence and an almost feral vitality layered over a sly sense of humor. It’s not for nothing that he is often compared to Marlon Brando.
At the end of episode one, Zubak seemed to have entered a fraught pact with Elena; he will tell her what “the people” — some of whom he allegedly shot down at Site Five — really want and move her policies away from the reality-grounded asks of her opportunistic cabinet ministers (who we see being arrested) toward some Strong Woman fantasy. And he will be the Strong Man behind her, whispering in her ear.
It’s not difficult to see “The Regime” through the lens of currents events, and the show is probably absolutely right to focus on the psychological quirks of the would-be authoritarian rather than the political mechanics. A lot of terrorists would find other avenues of expression if they had good love lives and it might well be that most dictators are motivated by the need to prove themselves to dear, dead daddy.
Whether “The Regime” emerges as a genuinely thought-provoking comedy (as “Veep” and “Succession”), or is simply a diverting comedy of bad manners (like Iannucci’s enjoyable but ultimately weightless space comedy “Avenue 5,” which was canceled after two seasons on HBO) remains to be seen. I understand reviews are polarized — which is usually the sign that something very different is going on.
The performances of Winslet, Riseborough and Schoenaerts will be enough to get me through the series, and the fact that these intentional performers were attracted to the script gives me hope for it. I hope I can trust their instincts and that “The Regime” will at least be earnest and bold.
That’s what we should want in our television series: Big swings by invested creators who have accumulated the capital to take chances — and risk failure.