‘The Regime’ Series Premiere Recap: The Great Dictator

At the risk of sounding like one of the terrified subjects of Chancellor Elena Vernham: You’ve made a marvelous debut, Chief. There’s nothing to complain about in the first episode of The Regime, and much to delight in. Written by Will Tracy (The Menu) and directed by Stephen Frears (The Grifters), it’s the strongest, sharpest, best-looking, and (very importantly) funniest satire of wealth and power HBO has served up in its whole “satires of wealth and power” era. 

Kate Winslet (if she’s ever looked better I’d almost be scared to see it) stars as the Chancellor, ruler of a small Central European nation. Having come into power via what was, I’m oh so sure, every bit the “free and fair election” she claims it was — she is in actuality the daughter and heir of the country’s founder, who lies semi-preserved under glass for her to visit and fret over — the Chancellor is, by now, struggling through it.

A major cobalt mining deal with the United States has been threatened by the massacre of protesting miners by her soldiers — not by the immorality of the act, of course, but by the optics of the act. Her advisors, most prominently her finance minister Susan Guy (Pippa Hollywood) and her personal physician Dr. Kershaw (Kenneth Collard), casually despise her, mock her behind her back, and manipulate her to her face. The entire palace this all takes place in is under constant renovation, cleaning, and de-humidification due to the Chancellor’s irrational fear of mold, which she blames for her father’s death from lung disease. She seems to like her brusque major domo Agnes (the great Andrea Riseborough) and Agnes’s kid enough, and she’s fond of her dipstick husband so far as it goes, but that’s about it.

On the eve of an important national holiday during which the cobalt rights are to be negotiated, the team brings aboard Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) to serve as her personal air-moisture monitor. (He walks around with a gizmo straight out of Peter Venkman’s little toys in Ghostbusters and barks out the occasional percentage and that’s about it.) Zubak, whose perceived stupidity and lumbering physicality make him a target of open mockery by all the high-class people in the palace, apparently took part in the so-called Site Five Massacre of miners, and this is his get-out-of-jail-free card. (Hiring him serves the government’s contention that what happened at the mine is nbd.)

Obviously smitten with the Chancellor though he is — and in those dresses, courtesy of costume designer Consolata Boyle, who wouldn’t be — Zubak is not a good match for the job. Following her around like a dog he can do, but subtlety, required when managing her various hangups and phobias around visiting dignitaries, is not his strong suit. He is quickly demoted to working the graveyard shift and told he’ll never see her again, but not before she slaps him silly for his transgressions first.

He’s devastated, spending his nighttime rounds literally beating his chest and repeating, over and over, that he should kill himself. But fate has more in store for our man Zubak: He overhears the sounds of an intruder in the Chancellor’s bedroom and winds up saving her life from an assassin, a miner posing as a construction worker on the palace’s endless anti-mold renovations in order to get close to her. The next thing you know, Zubak is literally the only person she’ll trust, even the only person she’ll see. 

Which he takes advantage of, for better or for worse. You can’t help but root for the guy when he tries to snap her out of her obsession with mold, which he tells her is being abetted by Susan and Kershaw, among others. It’s they who are the lethal presence in the palace, not mystery mold. He’s not wrong about any of that. 

But the course he advises her to take is an unexpected one. Crush your enemies, he advises her. Spit in America’s face as they’ve spit in hers. Purge the bureaucracy. The Chancellor, who has the obvious cognitive impairment of a person who’s never been told “no” or even faced a substantial obstacle to “yes” in her life, believes he speaks with the voice of the people. Cured of her germophobia (she thumb wrestles with Agnes’s kid, driving home the change in the cutest way possible), she addresses the nation regarding her big, bold, possibly insane plan to Make Unnamed Central European Nation Great Again.

Tracy’s script is an on-point exploration of how right-wing autocracy manifests itself these days, and most days in the past for that matter. You have a charismatic leader whose obvious, even comical failings do nothing to ameliorate the devotion of their followers. You have a surrounding coterie of sycophants, brown-nosers, lickspittles, and lackeys who jump when the leader says “frog.” You have international business interests, happy to go along with the brutality as long as it doesn’t interfere with, and preferably enhances, their ability to extract money from a given land and its people. You have a full modern image-making apparatus, including glossy photo shoots with fashion mags, with the occasional tough question thrown in so everyone involved can feel better about themselves. You even have the weird hypochondria/germophobia common to so-called strongmen from Hitler to Trump. 

But the script also pulls off two important tricks that elevate the material from the kind of self-congratulatory political satire that merely rewards its viewers for agreeing with it. First, and on a fundamental level, everyone speaks English. Unaccented English at that, except for Elena’s French husband Nicholas (Guillaum Gallienne) and Zubak, whose unplaceable Central-Eastern European accent may be intended to mark him as an ethnic minority, I’m not sure. But the Chancellor and her whole cabinet? Queen’s E. 

This pulls double duty. First, it de-foreignizes and de-ethnicizes autocracy. If it can happen with people who sound like The Great British Baking Show, it can happen anywhere, including here. Second, it’s still English English, not American English. This way, the domestic audience is not granted the easy out of just saying “Oh hey, she’s like Trump!” and calling it a day. Satires with easy one-to-one analogues often arrest thought rather than provoke it.

The script’s other big trick is Zubak himself. Who is this man? What is this man? Did he pull the trigger in the Site Five Massacre, or was he just a fall guy? Why does he have an accent no one else we meet shares? (My theories are above.) Does he love the Chancellor, as he claims to, or is he secretly hoping to bring her down?

One thing’s for certain: Zubak is positioned as the audience identification character, the fish out of water who gets plopped into this shark tank of sickos and swims along beside us as we find out what’s what. Naturally we sympathize with him as he’s routinely berated, insulted, and mocked to his face. We feel bad for the shit job he’s been given, and we feel bad he’s doing a shit job at the shit job. We, or at least I, even begin to suspect he had nothing to do with the massacre that earned him the nickname “Butcher,” and was maybe just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If nothing else he’s just a naive country boy in the big city, and who doesn’t love those?

Then comes his big speech to the Chancellor. For every good thing he does, like being the only person with the courage to tell the Emperor that she has no germs or clearing out bureaucrats who are clearly enabling her mental illness so they can get what they want, he encourages something potentially deadly (I don’t like the chances of the Finance Minister or the doctor in prison, do you?) or rejecting NATO membership on live television (probably a bit of a no-no, yeah?).  

All these questions make his big heel turn at the end of the episode, if that’s what it is, feel as exciting as it is shocking. When you see the fire in him as he describes his desire to smash the fucking faces of everyone in the Chancellor’s way, suddenly his being the Butcher of Site Five doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Certainly, the way he takes to his newfound authority as the only person in the world the Chancellor trusts suggests a man comfortable with wielding power. And now he’s her Rasputin. What could go wrong? I’m excited to find out.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.