The Regime debuted on HBO March 3, and sees Kate Winslet as Chancellor Elena Vernham, an autocrat atop a fictional European country. Things are not going well for Vernham, or for her country. Increasingly paranoid, she fears, among other things, that her palace is being overtaken by mold. Her aides tap a soldier, played by Mattias Schoenaerts, to walk in front of the chancellor with a device that measures humidity in the room. The pair grows awkwardly close, and the soldier emerges as a vital confidant to the chancellor.
Will Tracy is the showrunner and Stephen Frears directs.
The idea came to be after Tracy read The Emperor, by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, about the last days of Haile Selassie’s reign in Ethiopia. “It’s told in a quasi-oral history style, using the memories of various servants and functionaries who worked in Selassie's palace,” Tracy told B+C. “And it occurred to me that this might be an ideal precinct for a TV series, the elevator pitch being: 'What if you took one of those upstairs/downstairs shows like Downton Abbey, where you move between the servants and masters, only instead of setting it inside an English lord’s manor, you set it inside an autocrat’s palace?’ That was the very basic early germ of an idea, which first popped into my head about five years ago.”
There are six episodes. The cast also features Guillaume Gallienne, Andrea Riseborough, Martha Plimpton and Hugh Grant.
Tracy said the project got real momentum after Winslet signed on. “I think it was a situation where everyone was in full agreement: Stephen had somehow never worked with Kate and was dying to, HBO was very eager to continue their long and fruitful partnership with her, and I just felt she'd be perfect for the part,” he said. “At that point, I quickly wrote a draft of episode two as further enticement. We then had a lovely phone call, she joined the project officially, and all of a sudden the show started to seem like a very real and very classy proposition after years of seeming like some kind of eccentric crafting project I'd been working on in the garage.”
Reviews have been mixed. Winslet has been praised, and the show both celebrated and critiqued. The New York Times called Winslet “a dark-comic delight, with a clipped diction, an imperious bearing and hair-trigger anxiety. You’d expect Winslet to nail the drama, but she excels in comic set pieces, vamping her way through Chicago’s ‘If You Leave Me Now’ at a state banquet with Nicholas on the keyboard, like a fascist Captain & Tennille.”
The Washington Post said the show “clicks as comedy but flails as satire.”
Entertainment Weekly called it “A bleak, superficial exploration of the dangers of authoritarianism and the grim reality of America’s role in the oppression of people around the globe, The Regime may be timely, but it’s not particularly funny, edifying or insightful.”
Tracy, Frears and Winslet executive produce with Frank Rich, Tracey Seawar and Jessica Hobbs. The novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose books include Our Country Friends and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, is a writer on the show.
Tracy’s credits include The Menu, Succession and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
He isn’t about to share which real-life rulers inspired Elena. “Although I certainly did quite a bit of research into various leaders and regimes past and present in order to make sure I wasn't being a complete dilettante, my hope is that Elena Vernham won't strongly remind viewers of anyone other than Elena Vernham herself,” he said. “She’s quite a unique individual, and I’m not sure any head of state past or present quite resembles her in message or form.”
Tracy added that he “wouldn't be surprised if we see an Elena clone or two pop up somewhere around the globe in the coming years. God forbid.”
