The Regime: Political Satire Without the Politics 

By Mia Ogle

The 2000s marked a shift in America’s television appetite. Shows like The West Wing (often dubbed as liberal political porn), which expressed an unwavering faith in America’s endless cycle of old-white-dude-in-chiefs, suddenly felt… antiquated. The American people, confronted with the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and consistent government failure lasting into the election of Donald Trump, began to crave something a little more cynical. For the past 10 years HBO has managed to satiate this demand for political satire. Julia-Louis Dreyfous’s second renowned sitcom Veep, which was created in 2012 and lasted into 2016-2019, expressed an increasing lack of faith in the American political system intensified by the Trump era. Vice President Selena Meyer and her posse of preposterous politicians made us laugh because we resonated with underlying themes about egotistical and power hungry “public servants” (and, of course, because Julia Louis Dreyfous is a comedic genius.) Succession (2018-2023) picked up where Veep left off, following Kendall, Roman, and Shiv Roy as they battled it out for control of their father’s Fox-esque media empire. In Succession, equally hilarious yet fully fleshed out characters allowed us to understand the inner workings of the 1% without justifying any of their terrible behavior — ultimately, the tragedy of the Roy siblings served as a brutal critique of America’s media landscape and election process. 

Now, as we forge forward into potentially yet another Trump era, HBO is back at it again. The Regime is its latest attempt to fill the Succession shaped hole in our cynical little hearts, though with a slightly more removed perspective — Kate Winslet is Elena Verhham, chancellor of an unnamed country somewhere in “Middle Europe.” Written by Will Tracy (Succession) and executive produced by Frank Rich (Succession, Veep), The Regime should combine the comedic genius of Veep with the perceptive bite of Succession into HBO’s latest satirical showstopper. Instead, it manages to find the flattest middle ground possible — The Regime, unfortunately, is just a directionless puddle of unanchored satire. It has no idea what it wants to be, so it never really becomes anything

A familiar writing style emerges almost instantly — The Regime has all the quippy dialogue and flashy insults of Veep and Succession, and Kate Winslet dishes them out with ease. Her performance is electric, utilizing bizarre intonation and a childlike droop of the lower lip to lean heavily into the absurd. But, without any semblance of a point, all the banter and blasphemy and absurdity falls flat. The Regime’s core is its characters, yet each one of them lacks development. Chancellor Elena’s cabinet consists of nothing more than your average self-interested old dudes. She coparents an epileptic child with her harried aide Agnes, but we never learn enough about the child or Agnes to care. And then along comes Herbert. Herbert is known as the “butcher,” for violently shutting down a protest prior to being reassigned as Elena’s “mold man” (his job is to literally walk in front of her and measure humidity.) He is a common soldier from a working class neighborhood, and Elena sees him as a tether to her country’s ordinary people, her “loves.” Elena herself is completely mad. At first, her request to sweep the palace of nonexistent mold came off as a crazed yet tolerable nuisance. But then demands to incorporate “folk remedies,” aka dirt, into her diet (at Herbert’s request) snowball into right-wing populist political advances (also at Herbert’s request). And, as the power dynamic between Herbert and herself shifts, she has no trouble exploiting his explosiveness, revealing just how cruel she can be.

Their relationship is tense, erotic, and certainly the eye around which the hurricane of The Regime swirls. Unfortunately, it never really amounts to anything. Herbert basically functions as the foil through which to understand Elena, who is cut from the same soulless cloth as many of our beloved political satire leads. But she’s not funny enough to be Veep’s Selena Meyer and, though we get glimpses into a tumultuous past, lacks the depth of analysis to be a Succession-esque tragic Roy sibling. Perhaps if The Regime had really leaned into one of its many real world references — US exploitation or Trump-esque populism, for example — Elena’s character would have sharpened. But with nowhere specific to anchor her, we are left with a generic, “bad” authoritarian leader. And what, really, is there to say about that?

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