After The menu, toca The regime. I am not referring to the diet that many of us fall into following a binge, but to the miniseries The Regime, created by Will Tracy, screenwriter of Succession, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and from the aforementioned film in which a couple travels to an island to enjoy a peculiar gastronomic experience.
The Regime (HBO Max) is not going to shut up, as a gym instructor once recommended to me as the main exercise to regain a flat stomach. Or well, it is going to shut the hell up, but in another sense, because it tells the vicissitudes of an autocracy that has fallen into disrepair in an invented country in Central Europe. The tyrant is Kate Winslet. And of course, with it as a main dish, many of us will eat whatever.
The problem is that while one sees The Regime He doesn’t know what he’s eating. It is intended to be a political satire, but today, when political reality is full of parody without the need for it to be filtered by a scriptwriter, satires have to work hard so that they are more biting and refined than the menu that the newspaper serves us daily..The Regime It is generic and vague in its criticism, and does not find its tone. It aims to portray unbalanced, stupid and interested characters, but it seems to forget that no matter how stupid the hands we fall into sometimes are, the perspective from which one tells them cannot be as vulgar as its protagonists.
It’s not even original by placing a widely beloved star in the role of a villain at the head of a dystopian country: We already enjoyed Emma Thompson in Years and Years. And following seven joyous seasons of Veephaving a woman star in a political satire doesn’t make a difference either per se. The more I see of The Regime, I miss Armando Iannucci the most, who also knew how to make us laugh with his dissection of the paranoia prior to the fall of a dictator in Stalin’s death.
It is surprising that the series by someone involved in the program that best analyzes current affairs from comedy, John Oliver’s weekly half hour, is so lazy. And it is sad that so many good ingredients – directed by Stephen Frears and Jessica Hobbs, the cast also includes Hugh Grant and Martha Plimpton, the soundtrack is by Alexandre Desplat – do not make up a good menu.
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