The Regime Review: HBO's Political Satire Misfire Should Be Impeached for Wasting Kate Winslet

The Regime Review: HBO’s Political Satire Misfire Should Be Impeached for Wasting Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet is one of our greatest working actors and recently won a well-deserved Emmy for playing a hard-nosed Pennsylvania cop on HBO’s Mare of Easttown. Will Tracy wrote for Succession and also co-penned the big-screen culinary thriller The Menu. Stephen Frears is a celebrated film director who has helmed classics like Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters. I say all of this up front to make it clear that even if you enjoyed all of these projects, like I did, it won’t change the fact that The Regime is not very good at all.

HBO’s new political satire starring Winslet, with Tracy writing the scripts and Frears directing half the episodes – premiering this Sunday at 9/8c; I’ve seen the first two – is supposed to be a comedy, but here’s the problem with that: It’s thuddingly, clangingly unfunny. With a bizarre, overly broad tone that feels like a silly comedy skit that goes on way too long, The Regime stands as a staggering misfire and a regrettable waste of the great talent it’s assembled. It’s one of those shows that makes you wonder how it ever got a greenlight, or if someone may have considered scrapping the whole thing midway through.

Winslet plays Elena, the iron-fisted chancellor of an unnamed fictional country somewhere in “Middle Europe.” She preaches freedom and democracy in public while her soldiers are vilified as “butchers” for their violent crackdowns on protestors. Her underlings scurry to kiss up to her and humor her delusions, but she starts to lose confidence in her leadership – until a gruff soldier named Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) is brought in to be her new bodyguard, eventually becoming her sounding board and closest confidante and inspiring her to rediscover her inner fire.

On Succession and in The Menu, Tracy proved he excels at crafting portraits of curdled privilege, but the finely honed scalpel he applied there has turned into a blunt meat cleaver here. Everyone’s a bit arch and off-putting. The characters trade colorful Veep-style insults, with one being labeled a “mewling vulva,” but there’s a distinct lack of nuance or recognizable humanity to all of it. Many of the goofy attempts at humor simply elicit a groan. (Elena has a fanatical obsession with moisture and humidity that gets old very quickly.) Plus, there’s this: In a dangerous time when strongman authoritarians are gaining power and crushing dissent all over the world, do we really want to chuckle along with one?

Winslet’s acting credentials are impeccable, of course, but she is a tad overheated here as Elena, employing a conspicuous lisp that only makes Elena seem more ridiculous. (A scene in the premiere, where Elena delivers a badly off-key rendition of a Chicago soft-rock tune, might go down as the most cringeworthy scene of the year.) Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough plays her assistant Agnes with a severe haircut and manner reminiscent of Frau from the Austin Powers movies. There are small glimmers of a better show in here at times: Schoenaerts hints at an intriguing sadness behind Zubak’s eyes, and Winslet does some nice verbal sparring with Martha Plimpton as a U.S. diplomat – but that soon gives way to broader schtick, and we’re back to groaning again.

The Regime is only a six-episode limited series, but that’s just as well: Based on the early returns, a second term was a long shot anyway.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Don’t throw away your vote on The Regime, a ridiculous and misguided political satire that even Kate Winslet can’t salvage.

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