I’m not a professional critic, but I’ve been designated Digital Trends’ Hater of the Year, something I wear with great pride. (And just a touch of fear.) While I was more than eager to complain about Trap, a movie that makes me viscerally angry to even think about, the TV show I hated most didn’t immediately come to mind.
In desperation, I scanned the Emmy nominations for inspiration and, sure enough, I found a winner or, rather, loser: The Regime. I had literally forgotten about because I gave up back in April after watching the first miserable episode.
For your entertainment, I spent a few days of my life this week watching the entire putrid season. I won’t spend nearly as many words on this tripe as I did on Trap because the problems The Regime aren’t quite as specific. In large part, they can be summed up with one word: paradox.
The Regime sticks to a binary ‘versus’ structure that makes it a pain to watch
The Regime seems intentional with its use of paradox to expose political hypocrisies and emphasize the cyclical nature of political history, especially those committed by the United States in foreign diplomacy.
Drama versus comedy, past versus present, Capitalism versus Marxism, fantasy versus. reality, domination versus conciliation — The Regime navigates conflicts between all of these ideas, but ultimately bites off far more than it can chew, resulting in strange pacing, poor character development, and a plot that is patently unbelievable, especially when you consider the historicity that it’s clearly based on.
Let’s be clear: The Regime is a postmodern retelling of Grigori Rasputin’s infiltration of Czar Nicholas II’s court, right down to Chancellor Elena Vernham’s (Kate Winslet) husband consort being named Nicholas. This fact is so obvious that the choice to set this unnamed country with a Marxist history in Central Europe and make it completely oblivious to Russian history is consistently infuriating.
This context would, unsurprisingly, be incredibly valuable to Vernham, a once-powerful autocrat who is losing her grip on both her power and her reality. Believing the air around her is constantly poisoned by mold, she enlists a particularly vicious army corporal who killed 12 miners in the unseen moments before the show to be her personal moisture reader. Why him? She wanted one of the soldiers responsible for this global embarrassment.
A problematic portrayal
Vernham, you might think from this decision, is a ruthless dictator who completely dominates all in her sphere. The Regime very quickly ventures to prove the exact opposite, to the point that Vernham might be one of the most misogynistic characters I’ve seen on television. Within roughly 45 minutes, she’s characterized with basically every stereotype you’ve ever heard about women in power: She’s impulsive, she’s irrational, she’s emotional, she’s overwhelmingly influenced by others. But most importantly, she has such a debilitating need to be loved that she regularly converses with her dead father, whom she keeps entombed like Vladimir Lenin, to make herself feel good.
Not only is she feckless but in a world dominated by men in which she, supposedly, was at one time the puppet master, she becomes the complete puppet of Zubak in one episode. It’s impossible to believe that this talentless, guileless, easily manipulated, and violently narcissistic woman was ever elected to power in the first place. “Being mean” is not a leadership trait, and it’s the one she falls back on repeatedly throughout the series.
When Vernham does finally begin to regain her agency, it’s only because she had the sternest talking-to yet by Lenin her dead dad, who basically tells her to be the absolute worst leader possible. Her entire identity is tied to the control of less-powerful men.
No direction home
Moreover, Vernham, like the plot of The Regime, appears to have no direction. There’s no clear motivation. She regularly talks about her “dream,” but it’s never really clear what that is. Initially, she seems to want to create an isolationist autocracy that retains complete control of its natural resources. But she, or representatives of her government, also say they want a “true democracy,” admission to NATO, and regional war to bait America. In the opening scene, we hear her military killed 12 protesting miners. By episode 3, Zubak has Vernham declaring the return of all private property to the people despite her spiderweb of corrupt personal holdings and invades a neighboring country in exact parallel to Putin’s actions in Ukraine. By episode 4, she’s become a Chinese puppet.
The plot and motives are all over the place, the characters are unforgivably stupid and ill-defined, and you can’t help but feel whiplash between episodes. It’s not tension — it’s a lack of conviction.
The Regime seems to want to satirize Russian history, criticize U.S. and Chinese imperialism, and celebrate self-determinism. It succeeds only at being almost completely impossible to follow — which is perhaps it’s greatest tribute to Russian history.
The Regime is streaming on Max.
