The Regime: Kate Winslet's Strange Little Show

The Regime aired on HBO across six episodes in March and April. Created by Will Tracy (previously a writer on Succession and The Menu) and directed primarily by Stephen Frears, the show is a political satire set in an unnamed Central European autocracy whose specific details are kept deliberately vague.

The show received, at the time of its run, a specifically mixed critical reception, and it struggled with audiences. I want to argue for it anyway, because it is an odder and more interesting show than its reception suggested.

What the show is

Elena Vernham, played by Kate Winslet, is the chancellor of a small, cobalt-rich European state. She is medically obsessed, politically paranoid, physically fragile, and surrounded by a specific court of functionaries who exist primarily to manage her anxieties. Into this arrangement arrives Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a disgraced corporal fresh from a political scandal involving protesters, who is hired by Elena as a kind of personal health consultant-turned-confidant. Over the course of six episodes, Herbert’s influence grows, the state’s political situation destabilises, and Elena’s regime moves through specific phases of increasingly unhinged governance.

The show is, structurally, a chamber piece. Most of the action takes place inside Elena’s palace. The outside world (the cobalt mines, the capital city, the countryside) is glimpsed rather than depicted. The camera stays with Elena and her court.

What the show refuses

The central formal decision of The Regime is to refuse to provide the specific geopolitical detail that most political satires rely on. The state is unnamed. The historical period is contemporary but deliberately unspecific. The political ideology (Elena’s specific populism) is neither clearly right-wing nor left-wing in any legible way. References to real political figures are intermittent and deliberately confused.

This refusal is a deliberate choice. The Regime is not interested in being a satire of a specific contemporary regime. It is interested in being a satire of the specific texture of autocratic household life, the specific rhythms of a political court, the specific ways a small circle of people accommodate a single unstable figure’s worsening decision-making.

This is a more interesting target than the show’s reception credited it for. Contemporary political satire tends to be aimed at specific identifiable figures (Trump, Johnson, Putin, Erdoğan) because the audience wants the specific targets. The Regime deliberately abstracts the specific in favor of the structural. The result is a show that is harder to read on first viewing and more interesting on second.

Kate Winslet, going weird

Kate Winslet’s Elena is, by any measure, the most formally strange lead performance Winslet has delivered in her career. Elena is, simultaneously, pathetic, terrifying, sympathetic, and absurd. Winslet plays all four registers in every scene, which requires a specific acting technique of rapid tonal oscillation that most leading actors cannot manage.

The scene in episode three, in which Elena delivers a televised address to her people while in the grip of a specific paranoid episode, is one of the most formally committed pieces of comic-dramatic acting I have seen this year. Winslet is playing pure panic inside the specific format of a head-of-state address, and the technical precision of the performance is extraordinary.

This is not, however, a performance calibrated for awards voters. Elena is too weird, too off-putting, too unwilling to settle into the recognisable categories that awards voters reliably reward. Winslet went unnominated for the major US awards, which is a specific oversight.

Matthias Schoenaerts, the other axis

Matthias Schoenaerts’ Herbert is the show’s second key performance, and it is the one most easy to under-rate. Herbert is introduced as a specific type (traumatised soldier, right-wing populist, physically imposing) and gradually revealed to be something stranger: a true believer whose specific ideology is more idiosyncratic than his initial presentation suggests, and whose capacity for violence is less contained than the court of functionaries around him are equipped to manage.

Schoenaerts plays the slow reveal of Herbert’s specific psychology with a precision that deserves more recognition than it received. His Herbert is not a satirical type; he is a specific person whose specific delusions structure his specific actions.

The tonal problem

Here is the show’s specific accessibility problem. The Regime’s humour is, across most of its running time, dark and specific in a way that requires the viewer to maintain two tonal registers simultaneously. The show is both a serious political drama and a satirical comedy, and the transitions between the two registers are not signalled. Viewers who come to the show expecting one or the other in clean form will be disoriented.

This is the reason for the mixed reception. Viewers who surrendered to the tonal uncertainty, as I did on second viewing, found the show rewarding. Viewers who wanted a more conventional satire (or a more conventional political drama) were not served by the show’s specific method.

Where it sits

The Regime was a limited series; no second season is planned. Tracy has moved on to other projects. Winslet has moved on to other projects. The show’s afterlife, such as it is, will be on streaming, where viewers who missed its initial airing can discover it at their own pace.

I expect the show to age better than its reception suggested. The specific quality of its formal experiment (a political satire that refuses geopolitical specificity) is exactly the kind of project that gets properly appreciated in retrospect rather than in the week of release.

Watch it across three sittings, two episodes at a time. Pay attention to the palace interiors, which are doing specific visual work. Let Winslet do the specific weird thing she is doing. The show has something genuine to offer.