With the world generally going to hell in a handcart right now, what better way to cope with the rising despair of autocracy around the world than by making a TV satire about it?
Enter The Regime. A six-part miniseries, ruled over imperiously by Kate Winslet, who is the model of dictatorial chic as Elena Vernham, the autocratic ruler of an unnamed “central European country”.
Winslet’s Elena is a dictator ripped straight out of the crackpot autocrat textbook: she has a fixation with germs (the dehumidifiers in her palace run 24/7 to tackle a non-existent mould problem), keeps her dead father in an airtight coffin in the basement, and hires and fires her grovelling cabinet on a whim.
And she’s clearly falling apart. Into this mess comes Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a disgraced soldier she has plucked from obscurity, with the purpose of walking in front of her waving a moisture meter around (to protect against mould). But he quickly becomes more than that, and under his influence Elena starts giving in to her worst impulses – plunging the country further into chaos.
The premise is good, and the cast – including Hugh Grant and Andrea Riseborough – uniformly excellent. Schoenaerts plays Herbert with just the right amount of self-loathing and brutality, and while Winslet sometimes has to struggle with some truly insane dialogue – “Daddy, you’ve got spots now,” she tells the corpse of her father – her brittle, fractured Elena is always compelling.
The problem lies with the tone, which is wildly uneven, and the creeping awareness of just how little it has to say beyond the well-worn line of ‘power corrupts’. The country over which Elena rules is never discussed or described; the behaviour she slides into (public humiliations, ritual jailings) are par for the course, with the possible exception of ice baths on Zoom.
Plus, there’s the issue of Elena’s odder personality traits. Sure, it’s a satire, but the absurdity of some of her whims undercut what could be truly sinister moments. In one 10-minute sequence, she wraps the whole palace in plastic to prevent germs. Elsewhere she’s transported around on a hermetically sealed chaise longue. On the anniversary of her accession, she takes to the stage to croon a toe-curling, off-key ballad. To wild applause, obviously – and while they’re clearly taking a leaf out of the dictator’s playbook (Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan’s president, has a penchant for filming rap videos), Winslet doesn’t quite manage to sell it and it comes off as farcical rather than chilling.
That said, there are moments of genuine comedy here. Watching Elena’s cabinet ministers throw each other under the bus as they scrabble for authority is endlessly amusing (one running gag about chewing breath mints at all times so as not to offend Elena is great), as are elements of Herbert’s rise to power. “It’s like watching a dog using a calculator,” quips one minister, watching him wave his moisture detector around – a line that could be ripped straight from Succession, which is indeed where creator Will Tracy cut his teeth.
And as the show – and Elena and Herbert’s relationship – progresses, it becomes ever more twisted and fascinating. One moment, she’s slapping him around the face for making her look “crazy” at an official dinner; the next, his portrait is being hung up in her palace as a living descendant of the mythical “Foundling”: the person who is said to have founded their unnamed country.
The times being what they are, comparisons with Putin are inevitable, and certainly, it does seem as though the producers are playing with that. One scene, in which Elena and Martha Plimpton’s secretary of state Judith Holt, discuss the country’s cobalt mines from each end of a ridiculously long table, sent a shiver down my spine.
But Winslet’s ridiculous Elena is no Putin; she’s simply not scary enough. Less cobalt, more tinpot.
