In a wild scene from the new HBO comedy series The Regime, European dictator Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) sits down and opens fire on US diplomat Senator Holt (Martha Plimpton): “You shovelled shit on our doorstep for years and told us we were happy to eat it.” Senator Holt replies: “We shovelled quite a bit of investment your way as well.”

The hostile exchange is rich in nuance, leaning into the uncomfortable intersection of American imperialism, colonial exploitation, global economics and chequebook diplomacy. Unhappy with her lot, right-wing leaning Vernham is done. “It’s time to say enough,” she declares. “It is time to show America and the world precisely what we are worth.”

And so this darkly complex, at times hilarious, at times serious political satire lurches deeply into comedic discomfort. Over six episodes both the tinpot fictional country and its tinpot leader begin to unravel (at one point Elena extols the virtues of “potato steam”) and The Regime begins the uneasy dance of milking an uncomfortably serious topic for laughs.

So, just how funny is it meant to be? Created by Will Tracy (Succession) and produced by Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, The Grifters, The Queen) it is a satire, certainly, and at times intentionally verges on the lunatic. But there are also moments which seem uncomfortably real, a kind of dark reflection of what's happening two channels up on CNN.

"It is a geopolitical satire," stresses Winslet. "People are going to take from it what they choose to take from it and the show is pretty agnostic in terms of real life circumstances. But I think it's really important to remember that it is a comedy. It is not real. It's set in an imagined country, in the middle of Europe. It isn't a retelling of historical events, and it certainly isn't a docudrama."

From Winslet’s perspective, it was important to lean into the delusional qualities of Elena Vernham as much as possible, without losing a fix on the woman she was attempting to portray. She sacks ministers on a whim. She indulges in conspiracy theories and hokey remedies. And she consults her dead father, preserved in a glass coffin in the presidential palace basement.

“Digging into Elena’s childhood and trying to come to understand why she is the way that she is, it isn’t just a moment-to-moment thing,” Winslet says. “Here she is in this palace, she should feel safe. She’s surrounded by people whose job it is to make her feel safe. And yet, she feels permanently unsafe. That’s an emotional, mental thing.”

The mosaic of that woman, framed by international politics, but shaped by the legacy of her father who built the nation she has inherited, manifested in a number of ways, Winslet adds. “Her physical self and how she moves, how she speaks, how she interacts, even whether she walks through a door or not,” she says.

And in the midst of all of that blossoms a love story, between Vernham and Colonel Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hardline thug who unexpectedly becomes a trusted advisor. Their relationship moves between gentle and disturbing. Vernham is delusional, but Zubak veers from vulnerable to menacing.

“These are two people who should never have met and should never have fallen in love,” Winslet says. “And that was up to Matthias and I, we had to really give that a heartbeat so that that would be believable. That was the one thing we really had to make sure audiences went with, [that they] were sucked into their relationship... For us, it was a lot of fun.

“I had to give her a heart and a soul without also trying to make the audience love her,” Winslet adds. “That would not have been right. I had to kind of walk the line between the comedy and tragedy of Elena Vernham. We all kind of did it together. We were very much an ensemble cast of people trying to hit the same rhythm.”

Loading

Like many women in global politics, how Elena looked really mattered to Winslet, which led to a detail-rich collaboration with Oscar-nominated costume designer Consolata Boyle (The Queen, Florence Foster Jenkins). Critical, says Winslet, was smudging the cultural and fashionable style notes, to create a little bit of uncertainty in the mind of the viewer as to precisely where in Europe Elena was from.

"We didn't want to use traditional fabrics, so we used a lot of fabrics you just don't see in regular clothes, a lot of synthetics," Winslet says. "I was very flammable at times, and very hot. And [because she is a leader] a lot of the costumes had to be practical. There's a lot of running, particularly as the series progresses."

‘Everyone’s lying to her the entire time. No wonder she doesn’t trust anyone.’

Kate Winslet

Equally, Winslet says, because the series is a love story as much as it is a satire, she had, at times, to look sexual. “This is the woman who’s trying to exert her power all the time, and never really getting it right,” says Winslet. “Making the mistake of thinking that the way that you feel good about yourself is by dressing in ridiculously tight pencil skirts and lacquering her hair up a little bit.”

And where the series strays into the darkness in its writing, Winslet pulls it back towards the light in her performance, which is riddled with physical tics, an almost pathological interest in home remedies and odd quirks, such as steaming potatoes for the supposed health benefits of inhaling their fumes.

Series director Jessica Hobbs, whose credits include Tangle, The Slap, Broadchurch and The Crown, describes Tracy as “a very clever, very funny writer”.

“The scripts made me laugh out loud reading them. They went through some processes, and there were some great bits of improvisation that came in. But it was very sharp.”

The series even taps into the curious political trope of world leaders singing. A search of YouTube will turn up all sorts of delights, though the series is most likely making a nod to Russian leader Vladimir Putin singing Blueberry Hill at a dinner in St Petersburg in 2010. To add some comedic richness to the moment, Elena sings out of key.

“I definitely felt nervous about the singing in the first episode because it was a really specific choice to have her sing badly,” Winslet says. “It was scripted that she gets up, and she performs, and she sings really well but when we recorded the song Stephen Frears [was shaking his head, and he said] I don’t understand why is she singing so well? Do it badly.

"And then it was brilliant because you immediately give the audience permission to lean into just how delusional this woman is," Winslet adds. "She actually believes she's singing well. She actually believes they adore her. Everyone's lying to her the entire time. No wonder she doesn't trust anyone. It's absolutely hilarious."

Modern and past European history is replete with strong, right-wing women leading hardline political parties, such as Giorgia Meloni from Italy and Marine Le Pen from France, as well as Siv Jensen in Norway and Pia Kjærsgaard in Denmark. Widening the lens, Argentina’s Eva Peron or even the Philippines’ Imelda Marcos, offer templates that might have inspired Elena Vernham.

Tracy has not identified any one person, or any one country, that the series is based on. “Luckily for us, the show is in an imagined country, and the character is a complete invention,” Winslet says. “It isn’t based on history. It isn’t a documentary. It’s not a retelling of real-life events. And so it was actually very important that I didn’t go down the road of drawing comparisons from political figures.

“Elena is nothing like anything I’ve ever come across in my life before,” she adds. “I have to somehow transform myself and become this disgusting, wild, tyrannical, but vulnerable, interesting, multi-textured, complicated woman. I dug into that. That was really my job. I didn’t want her to look like this perfect shouting dictator who is shrill sometimes. That was not interesting to me.”

Frears is more certain there is a grain of something in it all, but unsure about where the grain might belong. “There isn’t anybody like Elena,” he says. “Marine Le Pen isn’t like that, nor is Giorgia Meloni. Will, who invented the whole series and invented the world, was very keen not to be specific to one country.”

The biggest fear, Frears says, is that the series would be strongly identified with Russia. In terms of setting, the creative team “would talk about middle Europe, it was really set there,” Frears says. “And then the instances of dictatorial behaviour would come from all over the place. It wasn’t ever specific, and there was really nobody to compare it to.”

"The idea was to shine a satirical light on those behaviours, and make that entertaining," Hobbs adds. "As someone said, they felt uncomfortable about the fact that they were laughing so much. I think [that is] the sweet spot for the show, I think it's good if it makes you uncomfortable to laugh at it."

The Regime streams on Binge from March 4.

Power plays

Political satire has a rich on-screen history. Ben Pobjie replays some of The Regime’s best predecessors...

The Thick of It

Armando Iannucci’s first great TV success is so much more than Peter Capaldi swearing, although that alone is worth tuning in for. Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, brutal political enforcer, is a magnificent monster, abusing and berating all as he tries to keep tight control of the bumbling politicos and staffers under his purview. Nobody is noble, nobody is pure, and everybody is both corrupted and crushed by the necessities of modern politics, as Iannucci makes a thoroughly depressing but incredibly funny depiction of how things are done in the corridors of power. Streams on BritBox and Stan.

Veep

Satires with women at the centre are few and far between, but Iannucci gave the role of a lifetime (Seinfeld notwithstanding) to Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the sweary, desperate, ambitious and gaffe-prone Selina Meyer, vice-president and later president of the United States. Louis-Dreyfus’ performance, as well as powerhouse turns by co-stars such as Tony Hale and Matt Walsh, garnered much-deserved plaudits, but the razor-sharp mockery of American politics and its many and depressing absurdities is the show’s bedrock. Streams on Binge.

The Clarke/Dawe Interviews

Australia’s greatest satirist was, predictably enough, a Kiwi. In two-to-three minute chunks at week’s end on A Current Affair and The 7.30 Report, Clarke assumed the role of a dazzling array of Australian and international political, business, and other prominent figures, all without makeup or vocal mimicry. The decision to eschew impersonation was genius, as Clarke and Dawe (the latter playing the long-suffering interviewer) spun satirical gold by focusing on the ideas, dishonesty and corruption being skewered, rather than personalities.

Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister

The journey of Jim Hacker from hapless Minister for Administrative Affairs to hapless Prime Minister was a compelling one, as this lethally well-mannered satire from Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn became the benchmark for all future political satires. Paul Eddington as the ambitious but clueless Hacker, Derek Fowlds as his dedicated and verbose private secretary Bernard Woolley, and especially Nigel Hawthorne as the monstrously Machiavellian civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby are all marvellous. Jay and Lynn took deadly aim at the moral compromises of politics and the dead hand of bureaucracy that stifles any hope of progress. Both stream on BritBox.

The Great

Another delightful depiction of a woman in power, The Great is an extremely loose adaptation of the life of Catherine the Great of Russia, using history as the jumping-off point for wickedly delirious adventures in comedic political machination. Created by Australian Tony McNamara, The Great depicts Catherine’s struggle to survive and thrive in the Russian court, and her plot to get rid of her husband, Emperor Peter III. Elle Fanning as Catherine and Nicholas Hoult as Peter lead a cracking cast in a frequently dark but always gorgeous dance through history and politics. Streams on Stan.

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Stanley Kubrick’s piercing indictment of Cold War politics and nuclear brinksmanship began life as a serious drama about a nuclear crisis, but in the scriptwriting process he and his fellow writers found the reality so absurd they felt the story made more sense as a comedy. Peter Sellers, in easily his best performance, plays three characters: a meek and ineffectual US president, his sinister titular mad scientist, and a senior British officer. George C. Scott’s moronically belligerent general is another highlight of this hilarious, yet ultimately grotesquely bleak, attack on humanity’s willingness to self-annihilate.

House of Cards

The American remake is great (if now sadly tainted by its star Kevin Spacey’s off-screen actions), but you can’t go past the British original for its ferociously intelligent portrait of cold-blooded ambition and ruthless political intrigue. Ian Richardson pulls off an all-time great performance as the loathsome government whip Francis Urquhart, who embarks on a single-minded quest to attain the prime ministership. Urquhart will lie, manipulate, destroy lives and even kill to get what he wants. The rare non-comedic satire, House of Cards still boasts a script of enormous wit and flair, and its story of corruption rewarded is frighteningly plausible.

Frontline, Utopia, The Hollowmen

Special mention must go to the Working Dog team, and their classic satires skewering the bureaucracies and media ineptitude that prop up woeful politicians. For my money, Frontline remains their best, for the acuteness of its observations on the morally corrupt world of current affairs television, and for the sheer savagery with which it tears into its subjects: no punches are ever pulled here. Vapid presenter Mike Moore (Rob Sitch) is an all-time great comedy idiot, surrounded by various other fools and amoral bastards.