‘The Regime’: The Kate Winslet diet

After The Menu comes The Regime. I’m not talking about the diet that many of us revert to after enjoying an oversized meal, but to the new miniseries The Regime, created by Will Tracy, the acclaimed screenwriter of Succession, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and the aforementioned movie, in which a couple travels to an island to enjoy a singular gastronomic experience.

The Regime (HBO Max) isn’t about shutting your mouth (the recommendation I once received from a gym instructor advising me on how to flatten my stomach). Or rather, it is, but in a different sense: the movie is about a dictatorship, in an invented country in Central Europe. The tyrant: Kate Winslet. And of course, with Winslet as the main course, many of us will eat whatever is put in front of us.

The problem with The Regime, however, is that you never quite know what you’re eating. It tries to be a political satire, but today, with a political reality already suffused with parody, satires have to work overtime to be more biting and incisive than the menu already served up by the newspapers. The Regime is generic and vague in its criticism, and it fails to find a coherent tone. It attempts to portray unhinged, silly and self-serving characters, but forgets that no matter how stupid the people who come to control our lives might be, the perspective from which one satirizes should never be as crude as the subject of one’s satire.

Even in casting a widely beloved star in the role of a villain at the helm of a dystopian country is not an original idea: we already have Emma Thompson in Years and Years. And after seven joyous seasons of Veep, starring a woman in a political satire doesn’t make waves, per se, either. The more I watch of The Regime, the more I miss Armando Iannucci, who truly knew how to make us laugh with his dissection of paranoia prior to the fall of a dictator in The Death of Stalin.

It’s surprising that a series by the man behind the show that best analyzes current affairs from a comedic perspective — Last Week Tonight with John Oliver — would be so lazy. And it’s sad that so many good ingredients — Stephen Frears and Jessica Hobbs as directors, a cast that includes Hugh Grant and Martha Plimpton, and a soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat — make for such a poor meal.

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