Review: The Regime, "The Foundling"
Our discussion of The Regime in last week’s comment section basically amounted to a collective effort to understand what kind of show this is meant to be. It’s clear that this is a show that wants us to be destabilized, but is that actually a cohesive narrative strategy, or a scattershot approach to satire without a clear plan?
The opening of “The Foundling” is effectively a middle finger to these questions, jumping forward three weeks into another new mania defining palace life. After the intense sanitation theater of the premiere, we’re dropped into a new obsession, as Elena Vernham has become convinced that the steam from cooking potatoes has purifying qualities that is keeping the mold at bay. And when we get to breakfast, Zubak has fully turned Elena onto rural medicine, slathering her chest with mustard in a zany display that sends us into the zany opening title theme.
As I was watching “The Foundling”—admittedly after the Oscars, because I failed to realize the two-factor on the screener app was tied to my old phone—I realized that my response to the first episode is that I don’t really know if the details of any of these scenes matters. There’s a bunch of political exposition in the opening sections, as her various ministers navigate their frustrations with her bullish stance on America and she prepares for the arrival of a U.S. Senator (Martha Plimpton), but the generic setting and the tonal imbalances mean that there’s no real sense that any of it is going to matter. The geopolitical dimensions of the show lack precision, mostly a vessel for the personal dynamics of a chancellor, her new right hand man, and the other men in her life—her husband, the ministers—who are concerned that her latest obsession is damning the country.
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