It could be Austria-Hungary – in fact the series was partly filmed in Austria – or any of the former Eastern Bloc's people's democracies. It could be Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or any of the other autocrats of our time who lack a superego and thrive on the conspiracy drivel spewed out by the media and social media on command.

It could also be a cross between Succession and The Crown (incidentally, there are veterans of both series in the credits), or between The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940) and Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021), with the added bonus of an unintentional homage to Le Père Noël est une Ordure (Santa Claus is a Stinker, Jean-Marie Poiré, 1982) – on this point, you'll have to take our word for it, you won't regret it. It's a bit of all of the above, and the seams of the series created by Will Tracy for HBO are bursting under the pressure of the rich material and numerous references on which The Regime draws.

At the heart of the show is a rococo palace, where a petulant chancellor with a speech impediment and a difficult character wields joyful tyranny. A hypochondriac and paranoid, plagued by perimenopause symptoms, Elena Vernham is a capricious child who does what she wants with her husband (Guillaume Gallienne, elegant in a difficult role), mothers a son who isn't hers and insults the corpse of her father, kept in a glass box in the palace, every time something upsets her.

The series begins with popular uprisings in a poverty-stricken working-class province of this fictional Central European dictatorship, and the United States insisting on its interest in the country's only resource, cobalt. But what preoccupies the chancellor most of all is mold. Obsessed with the palace's humidity levels, she hires a renegade soldier, Corporal Zubak, to follow her around and make sure the air is dry enough. What follows is a Rasputinian affair and a disruption of palace politics with potentially dramatic consequences for the head of state.

Matthias Schoenaerts may give his all as Zubak, but the partnership never really takes off, and despite the contagious madness of this little world and the dazzling direction of Stephen Frears and Jessica Hobbs, the first episodes of The Regime stumble between all the directions that its complex writing suggests.

So when Hugh Grant appears, formidable as a political opponent who has been imprisoned and tortured for years, we can't help but think that perhaps the series should have played itself out there. It finally takes off, but at this stage, it's already a little late.

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