Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Regime’ On HBO, Where Kate Winslet Is An Increasingly Unhinged Leader In A Crumbling European Dictatorship

The Regime is the third series Kate Winslet has done for HBO. In Mildred Pierce, she was a Depression-era divorcee and restauranteur. In Mare Of Easttown, she was a police detective in a working class town in Southeast Pennsylvania. Now, she plays the increasingly paranoid and unhinged dictator of a country somewhere in Central Europe. Needless to say, the Oscar winner has quite the range, doesn’t she?

THE REGIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “MIDDLE EUROPE.” We see a massive government building on a hill. Then a big gate creaks open and a military convoy drives through.

The Gist: In one of the trucks is Corporal Herbert Zuba (Matthias Schoenaerts); he is one of the soldiers considered one of the “Butchers of Area 5” after they open fire and killed a group of cobalt miners there. He’s brought in by Agnes (Andrea Riseborough), the manager of the chancellor’s palace; though he’s been disgraced by the Area 5 massacre, his presence has been requested by Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet).

Everything in the palace is wrapped in plastic; because of her respiratory issues, Vernham is deathly afraid of the presence of mold spores, and the entire palace is undergoing a deep cleaning. Vernham wants Corporal Zuba to be her “water diviner”; in other words, he’s supposed to walk near her holding a hygrometer, measuring the humidity of any room she’s in. The drier the room, the better.

When he’s brought into her office, she tells him she wanted a “Site 5 boy,” mainly because of their decisive actions during that protest. “There’s a good man in there who deserves love,” she tells him.

During an address for Victory Day, which celebrates her electoral victory over the previous regime, Vernham implies that she hasn’t left the palace’s premises for quite some time, and given how she can’t control the humidity outside the palace, that makes sense.

The next day, Victory Day, Zuba goes with Vernham to her cabinet meeting. Susan (Pippa Haywood), the minister of finance, is pressing her on the cobalt mining deal that is being negotiated with the U.S. government. She used to be all for the deal, but now the idea of giving up rights to another government makes her look, in her words, “fucking weak.”

At a Victory Day reception, Vernham comes out and sings “If You Leave Me Now,” accompanied by her husband, Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne). She sits with the CEO of one of the American companies who will be brokering the cobalt deal; when she finds out that eventually control of the mines will shift to the Americans in the deal, she gets incensed. Zuba tries to intervene according to his instructions to not let her shake hands with anyone and discreetly give her the relative humidity of the room, but he does so too aggressively, and Vernham slaps him for making her look like a lunatic in front of the Americans. She relegates him to overnight duty.

During that first overnight, he finds that a miner has somehow made his way into Vernham’s bedroom and is sitting on her bed. He manages to subdue the intruder with the same sense of violence that he used on Site 5. This endears him to Vernham, and he becomes the only person who can be around her while she recovers from the incident. When she asks him for some honesty, he tells her that the only thing in the palace making her sick are the people around her, who all seem to want her to fail.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Regime, created by Will Tracy (The Menu), definitely has elements of Tracy’s previous show, Succession, and elements of Veep. Not coincidentally, Frank Rich is an executive producer of all three shows.

Our Take: While we were watching the first episode of The Regime, we couldn’t help but feel that the main reason we were watching the show was just to see Kate Winslet let it rip as the increasingly unhinged Elena Vernham, complete with a haughty British lilt, a lisp, and a tic that shows her literally talking out of the side of her mouth at times. Those little mannerisms tie the character that Winslet is establishing together, someone who barely looks calm and collected on the outside, but can pull it together just enough to make her look like a leader to those who aren’t looking carefully enough.

Schoenaerts as Zubak makes a good foil and confidant for Vernham. We know that Zubak has that sense of violence in him, and when he gets the opportunity to get in Vernham’s head, he does so with a vengeance. His increasing influence on her will be interesting to watch, as it already seems to be taking effect by the end of the episode, where her doctor and finance minister are carried away in handcuffs, and she vows not to suck at the “teat” of NATO and the U.S. anymore.

So far, we don’t see anyone really opposing Vernham, but that will soon change as Martha Plimpton will be playing the U.S. secretary of state and Hugh Grant will be playing the chancellor that Vernham defeated seven years prior. That opposition will be needed, because in the first episode, we just see a group of toadies indulging Vernham’s paranoia and hypochondria, and we don’t get a sense of how truly dysfunctional things are in Vernham’s administration.

One of the other things that we’re going to find interesting is seeing just how Vernham’s isolation is portrayed during the rest of the series. Stephen Frears, who directed the first episode and directs the series along with Jessica Hobbs, has set up this isolation in the form of placing Vernham in large, ornate palace rooms filled with industrial air purifiers, putting her in subdued light during her darkest moods, and generally giving Winslet the opportunity to put Vernham on this emotional island, with no one around to understand what she’s going through, with the possible exceptions of Zubak and the rotting corpse of her father, the founder of her political party whom she thinks is preserved under glass in a room in the castle.

But Winslet’s performance is what’s going to keep us watching, even if most of the characters around her are flatter than we would like, at least right out of the gate.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: A closeup of Vernham addressing the country, then we see the palace again as she says, “I bless you all, and I bless our love, always.”

Sleeper Star: Guillaume Gallienne plays Vernham’s husband Nicholas as the beta male he is, and when he recounts the sad tale of how he met and married Vernham, you really feel for him in that moment.

Most Pilot-y Line: Right before the cabinet meeting, comms minister Mr. Singer (Henry Goodman) calls one of the other cabinet members a “mewling vulva.” By itself, it’s quite the colorful phrase, but seems like it’s placed there in a “gag for gag’s sake” way.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Without Kate Winslet, The Regime would feel very cartoonish. But the vulnerability she brings to her spiraling benevolent despot gives the show just the depth it needs to be watchable.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.