The Regime is bad eastern European pastiche

When you tire of trying to find the humor in The Regime, HBO’s new satire set in an unnamed “middle European” country, you can keep yourself occupied by trying to identify all of the historical references. The series was shot in Austria and the interiors have a dilapidated imperial feel, so perhaps we’re meant to think of one of the Visegrád countries — Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary — that inherited the heartlands of the Habsburg monarchy. The government, however, is led by a capricious and occasionally brutal authoritarian. Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, often called Europe’s last dictator, immediately comes to mind.

Chancellor Elena Vernham, played by Kate Winslet, is said to have studied medicine in Paris. Her name and affect recall Elena Ceaușescu, wife of the notorious Romanian communist despot Nicolae Ceaușescu, who built her own cult of personality while collecting a long list of fake academic credentials. Maybe we’re meant to think of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, who once attended a Swiss boarding school incognito. Vernham also happens to be an extreme germaphobe, which suggests Vladimir Putin’s over-the-top Covid precautions. 

Then we have her aide-de-camp, Corporal Zubak, who has the accent and mannerisms of a backup NBA center from the Balkans forced to answer questions during a post-game press conference. His rise from military obscurity recalls the Cold War junta of colonels who ran Greece under American auspices, or one of the many coups that have plagued sub-Saharan Africa. 

You get the point. There is a long and storied history of authors inventing lightly fictionalized versions of actual countries. What the successful examples have in common is that they are close enough to the real world for their satirical or political messages to land, mainly because their creators paid attention to the details. The Regime, however, seems to be stitched together by people whose idea of Central Europe is derived from skimming back issues of the Economist. It’s not Mitteleuropa, it’s Middle European pastiche, with a few other stray references thrown in for good measure. 

Central and Eastern Europe are fascinating to outsiders because they combine the exotic and the familiar — a dash of oriental mystery added to the feudal and monarchical trappings of the Old World. The entire region has always been a terrifically weird place.  Lithuania was mostly pagan up until the sixteenth century. Muslim Tatars once fought for Catholic Polish monarchs. Colonies of industrious Germans made it as far East as the Volga. Transylvania was an early hotbed of Unitarianism. 

More recently, many of Eastern Europe’s worst dictators had their own personality quirks. Nicolae Ceaușescu was reportedly fond of hunting bears in the Carpathian Mountains. He was such a bad shot he had to be accompanied by a team of sharpshooters armed with silenced rifles, so as not to upset the great man’s estimation of his own prowess.  

Even today, there is plenty of material to work with. The post-communist transition period has been brutally difficult for many former members of the Eastern Bloc. Valuable state assets were sold off at bargain-basement prices to well-connected insiders and opportunistic Westerners. The Ceaușescus were summarily executed during the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Ex-operatives from their feared secret police, the Securitate, were rumored to be running the Romanian economy well into the 1990s. How’s that for a deep state?    

In its clumsy attempts at humor, The Regime gestures vaguely in the direction of these problems, but the setting is so confused that none of the jokes land. The militarized nature of the government would make sense if Vernham was a stand-in for Lukashenko or Putin. There’s even a glass mausoleum for Vernham’s venerated father, probably inspired by Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow. However, everyone seems to have a smartphone with internet access, including access to news sites critical of the government.  

At one point, a character says “state news” is the only source of information for the public. Perhaps this is a snide reference to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is not in the same class as Putin or Lukashenko, but has made a point of tightening his grip over Hungarian state media. There is a subtle, funny satire to be written about cynical politicians manipulating a fragmented information landscape riven by social media, conspiracy theories, generational divides and other fissures. The Regime is not that. It’s too in love with the militarized aesthetics of the late Soviet era to wonder how today’s central European politicians actually govern. 

The incoherence of the setting bleeds into the performances. One moment, Chancellor Vernham is performing a badly off-key version of “If You Leave Me Now” in front of visiting American dignitaries (shades of Eva Perón, another political figure who was… not from central Europe). Next, she’s yelling at an underling for mentioning her bizarre fixation on air quality in front of the guests. Servants of dictators are often subjected to sudden mood swings. But if Vernham is self aware enough to realize that her hypochondria is off putting to visitors, surely she should know that her crooning isn’t going to win friends and influence people.    

One of the show’s producers is Frank Rich, who once produced reliably left-of-center opinions for the New York Times op-ed page. This makes perfect sense. The Regime is a televisual representation of the liberal map of the world: There are some unstable countries on the European periphery, probably in the post-Soviet orbit. They used to be communist, which was bad, but now they’re reactionaries, which is worse. The audience will understand this because the dictator, who we’ve cleverly made a lady, complains about foreign meddling and relies on a brutal military aide with a heavy Slavic accent who talks fondly of his home village. The United States is also involved and probably responsible for many of these problems. Naturally, the amoral American mining executives are from Texas but — surprise! — they’re pescatarians. The most sympathetic character is a sharp-tongued woman who manages the dictator’s schedule. Inexplicably, everyone except the hard military man has a British accent.  

The Regime was clearly inspired by satirical American and British shows about politics, such as Veep or In the Loop. When watching its antecedents, however, you at least had the sense that the writers were passingly familiar with what they were satirizing. It’s a lesson worth considering for Rich and his collaborators. Write what you know, not what you vaguely remember reading about on Wikipedia.