‘The Regime’ Goes Zero to Ridiculous Way Too Fast
When you’re satirizing something real, you need to start slow and stay there for a bit. The Regime does not.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
AS A man who has written many flagrantly ridiculous things1, I can tell you that the secret to getting people to watch or read your ridiculous material is a literary technique known as Boiling the Frog2. This applies primarily to narratives that bury their ridiculousness under a thin coating of realism; if you’re going for a Douglas Adams/Monty Python romp you can start at 100 on the ridiculous scale because that’s the pigment you’re working in, it’s what your audience expects3.
Satire is a little different, though; when you’re trying to wear reality like a coat in order to sell your ridiculousness, you’ve got to boil that frog—start off relatively realistic and ease everyone in. A show like The Regime is obviously rooted in modern-day European quasi-democratic authoritarian countries, with the obvious intent to mine them for satirical, dark humor. That’s great! Add in Kate Winslet (doing some phenomenal just-had-a-mild-stroke acting4), and I was all in.
About thirty minutes into the first episode it became clear that no frogs were being boiled. The show was shotgunning frogs directly at me5.
Contrast
A satire like The Regime relies on the contrast between reality and the on-screen absurdity for its effectiveness. You need a baseline, a control—you need some normalcy to compare the craziness to6. Otherwise it’s just craziness for craziness sake, and while that can work in a more straight-forwardly silly premise, for something that’s drafting on real-life that just isn’t very effective.
In The Regime, we get a few minutes of the Control. When Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) is brought in to Chancellor Elena Vernham (Winslet) there are some hints that things are a bit nutty at the palace: There’s a lot of unnecessary renovation being done, lots of dehumidifiers, and Zubak’s job will be to walk around in front of the Chancellor and take constant air moisture levels, because of a mold outbreak. That’s all a bit nutty, but not totally outside the realm of rationality7.
And when Zubak meets Elena, she is crisp, competent, and put-together. A little weird, yes, but overall the first impression is one of a ruthless, intelligent administrator. Unfortunately, this control period lasts about five minutes8. Almost immediately, we’re plunged into Elena’ insanity—and Zubak’s enthusiastic support of it. Within half an hour, Elena is being carried around inside a plastic divan, wearing what can best be described as a cross between a Handmaid’s dress and a Hunger Games outfit. I’ll admit the visual elicited a nervous, uncomfortable laugh from me9, but it’s simply too fast. I still didn’t have my bearings in this fictional universe, and now I was trying to process a half dozen insanities all at once10.
Jeff: Out
It’s entirely possible that The Regime gets better. I will likely never know, because the rapid escalation of absurdity hurled me out of the first episode pretty fast, and the chances I go back—or, indeed, even remember that it exists—are slim11. The churn in streaming media is so frothy I forget things I would have actually enjoyed watching, so remembering something that managed to be disappointing is almost impossible.
And that’s the reason you have to calibrate stuff like the absurdity/realism quotient in a satire. If The Regime had given me a slower boil, a little more relatively realistic stuff before taking me into the Weird Place, I might have stuck with it. Because the realism would have made me care about this fictional world and the people in it, whereas the sudden lurch into crazy just underscored how none of it matters. Since I was never coerced into caring about the people and places in The Regime, the wringer that Chancellor Vernham is about to put them through just doesn’t resonate12. If the show had taken a little more time to introduce everything, and then employed a slow burn approach to the insanity, I would have been much more invested.
The problem, from a writer’s point of view, is that the absurdity is irresistible13. It’s what gets your motor running, it’s why you’re writing this story in the first place14. You can’t wait to get to Vernham in the plastic divan! It’s why you bought the ticket and started the totally unhappy process of laboriously building a story in the first place. So the urge to rush into the craziness feels natural. It feels like it’s the reason you came in the first place. Resisting, then, and being patient enough to build a more realistic beginning feels like wasted time. But it isn’t, of course—it’s like pouring a foundation for your house15. Sure, skipping that step gets you to the end much faster, but your house sinks into the ground and you drown.
I won’t claim I’ve never skipped the hard work and gone straight to the fun stuff. In fact, the last few home improvement projects I’ve attempted have all collapsed into a morass of injury, insurance fraud, and a hole in the basement that seems to connect to an alternative universe16.
NEXT WEEK: St. Elmo’s Fire and the Assholes All the Way Down Technique.
If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing to my paid fiction Substack, Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook!
E.G. I once wrote an article about anger management in my zine The Inner Swine that was imagined as a forum of celebrities, including myself of course and Mumm-Ra, The Ever Living from Thundercats.
I have also invented a dance called Boiling the Frog, but seeing me perform it is sort of like getting a glimpse of the elder gods from a Lovecraft story.
Douglas Adams co-created one of the most difficult text adventures I’ve ever played and I still resent him for it to this day. No tea and tea indeed.
Seriously, the way she delivers her lines as if half her face is paralyzed is kind of amazing. Actors! Best people in the world.
THIS METAPHOR WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
Similarly, you need to see me at a wedding after the Duchess has shined me up in order to appreciate just how not shined up I am on a regular basis.
Speaking as someone who has had a flooded house and battled mold, the experience does make you a little crazy. I’m not saying I want someone walking in front of me taking air moisture levels constantly … but I understand.
By sheer coincidence, this is also how long the impression of me as a normal person lasts.
Well into my dotage, of course, that’s basically the only type of laugh I’m capable of these days.
It’s like the time I was invited to a Kentucky Derby party: Nothing made sense, and I felt like I’d entered some kind of alternate reality.
The number of times I’ve thought well, maybe I’ll watch this show only to discover that apparently I watched all 6 seasons of it eight years ago is disturbing.
I mean, Jeff Winger made me care about a pencil in about two seconds. Writing isn’t hard, people.
Much like bourbon.
Also much like bourbon.
What happened to the boiling frogs, you ask? Shut up.
Unfortunately, it seems like one of the Not Good alternate universes, like one where all communication is done through charades.
Your line on streaming content stood out like a bright beacon on the hill. While not what the article was about, it resonates. I've been looking through my Netflix recommendations and I'll see that I've given a thumbs up to something and I'll open it up and think, I don't remember watching this. I guess I liked it but I can't recall anything about the characters or plot. The never ending waterhose of streaming content is all starting to run together now where very things stand out. And then the modern day quick quips in every show these days seem to be tailored to the ADHD prone and those brought up on Ritalin. I wonder if the speed at which these shows are being churned out also is showing up and taking form in their writing with the fast forward themes, plots, and dialogue? Nothing is really allowed to take hold anymore.