Is 'The Regime' Based on a True Story?
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
IF YOU HAVE found yourself craving sharp, sadistic dialogue and complex, at-times despicable characters since Succession ended, you're in luck. HBO's political satire The Regime stars Kate Winslet as Elena Vernham, the chancellor of a fictitious, increasingly unstable European country.
Created by Will Tracy, a writer on Succession and co-writer of satirical thriller The Menu, The Regime takes place over the course of a year, as Vernham embarks on an affair with disgraced soldier Zubak and grows ever more agoraphobic and paranoid, and civil unrest foments outside the palace walls.
The Regime combines all the political skewering of shows like Veep and The Thick of It with the kind of intense human drama and complex relationships viewers have come to expect from the prime, prestige Sunday night spot on HBO. And Winslet's performance is so nuanced, so specific, so weird, that you might find yourself wondering if Elena Vernham is a thinly-veiled version of a real person.
Is The Regime based on a real politician?
When Succession first began airing, the premise couldn't have any more clearly been rooted in reality; it was King Lear meets the Murdoch family. And so you'd be forgiven for thinking that Tracy emulated Jesse Armstrong's tactics and modeled The Regime on a real-life dictator. The truth is... kinda. But also not really.
The original idea for The Regime came to Tracy in 2018, when he read Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's book The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, a nonfiction account of the last days of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia. Specifically, Tracy's imagination was captured by the passages that focused on Selassie's staff.
The personal accounts of these "bodyguards, cooks, pillow bearers, valets, purse bearers, gift bearers, dog keepers, throne bearers, lackeys, and maids" all evoked the minutiae and crushing paranoia of palace life at the tail-end of an era, and seemed rife with the potential for rich storytelling.
However, while that was the initial inspiration for The Regime, the concept evolved over time until Tracy eventually arrived at the complex and twisted love story between Vernham and Zubak that would form the show's center of gravity. And he was eager to build out an entirely original and specific world for the show, to avoid direct comparisons with real regions, politicians, and current events—even if the airing schedule might invite such analysis.
"I did everything I could to go through there and try to iron out and remove any similarities or parallels as I could," Tracy told The Wrap. "Because it’s an invented country, and because it’s a small landlocked country in central Europe with a very particular politics and a very particular economy and very particular kind of leader, it would be difficult to mistake Elena for anyone but Elena."
As for Elena's cabinet of cronies, Tracy revealed to The Ringer that they too have some similarities with real figures in 20th century history. "They were a bit inspired by Hitler’s big four that he had around him towards the end," he explained. "Even when things were at their lowest, and it seemed like the Soviets were a week from the bunker, and it was hopeless, even then, they were still kind of fighting to be the favorite son. Like, who do you like best? They can’t quite get past that."
The Regime airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO.
You Might Also Like
