The Regime

Despite Winslet’s off-kilter charisma, it’s just not enough to have you pledging allegiance.

Winslet is so ludicrously watchable that it is hard to take your eyes off her, but when you do, the show runs into trouble.

There are some good lines (the Succession-esque “His profits are fucked like a spring donkey”) and some moments that, however unsubtle, cannot help but raise a smile. .... But overall, the comedy and the drama fall flat. The scattershot aim at everything and nothing leaves the viewer groping for sense and meaning. It feels like a waste of a very good opportunity and a large number of very, very good people.

As the series goes on, changing its spots, the fate of its protagonists becomes less compelling and (within a range of unpredictability) more obvious; the comedy fades and one disinvests from the drama. It’s a sum that’s less than its disparate parts. But I did like the parts.

I wasn’t always sure what The Regime was doing, or why, but Winslet’s work, a complex blending of physical and psychological choices, kept the series somewhere between watchable and fascinating.

The biggest struggle The Regime faces is its tendency to spotlight its worst characters through a more forgiving lens. Wielding comedy to poke fun at Vernham, Zubak, and their increasingly toxic relationship is where the series succeeds most.

Winslet is far from quashed — her all-in portrayal props up scene after scene, episode after episode — but a shining star isn’t meant to shine alone, an opinion “The Regime” itself supports, without realizing it’s got the same problem.

A rare misfire that's too heavy-handed and cynically predictable to score as political satire and too silly to resonate as an allegory of dangerously despotic government. Luckily, this Regime is ruled by Kate Winslet. [11 - 31 Mar 2024, p.5]

Matters develop and devolve amusingly enough, with Winslet and Schoenaerts’ chemistry escalating into codependent insanity until the show gets — for this viewer, at least — a little too dark and consequential to sustain the comedy at which it genuinely excels.

"The Regime", is a series of contradictions, wildly inconsistent in the course of a single episode. If you can get through the sluggish bits (particularly the last three of its six episodes), there's a lot of fun to be had until the bitter end of this absurd ride with Winslet and the rest of the talented cast.

Despite the first-class production design, the game efforts of the ensemble cast and some admirably big swings for the fences, “The Regime” isn’t one of those series where you to love to watch people who are terrible, a la the aforementioned “Succession” and “Veep,” or “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad.” In this case, we’re stuck with a group of mostly loathsome individuals who commit the cardinal sin of not being all that interesting while they’re being horrible.

While there’s a seemingly fertile idea in watching how an autocracy crumbles from within and without, as unchecked power breeds a kind of insanity, the more cerebral aspects largely get lost in the show’s eccentricities, overwhelming any sense of nuance.

While The Regime isn’t an outright disaster, for the vast majority of its runtime, it’s unable to deliver scathing political commentary or sharp comedy, instead settling into a humdrum, repetitive cadence.

The Regime may be timely, but it’s not particularly funny, edifying, or insightful. .... Elena can be confounding, but in Winslet’s hands, she’s never boring, and Riseborough’s Agnes — the only character with a modicum of empathy — makes the series’ overall misanthropy a touch more bearable.

Throughout, the humour is blunted Armando Iannucci. The tone lurches alarmingly from absurdist to serious and back again. A plot about a Ukraine-esque invasion feels clumsy.

The Regime is a satire without much of a bite and a comedy without much in the way of jokes. This revolution should not be televised.

Kate Winslet goes all out as the imaginary nation’s Elena Vernham, a neurotic hypochondriac whose delusions can have real and destabilizing, even deadly, results. But the show doesn’t match her vigor or her inventiveness.

Despite Winslet’s hard work – she is very serious in her wish to be funny – The Regime is toothless and joyless and easily HBO’s biggest fumble since The Idol.

Kate Winslet can do anything! But even this acting dynamo, giving her all to the role of a fictional European dictator who’s basically Putin in skirts, can’t save this fractured political farce from drifting clumsily and calamitously into incoherence.