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It’s called the “Netflix 12” — a group of 12 movies and documentary series that are turning Netflix into something of an original content mogul, even as it struggles to burn all the cash being thrown its way. The list was just released on Thursday with a splash in the website’s homepage, enticing subscribers to “make sure you’re caught up with these 12 titles.”
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How To Become A Tyrant Netflix Review
How To Become A Tyrant dropped on Netflix last week unannounced; it’s not even in the streamer’s extensive “New On Netflix” newsletter that sites like ours use to preview what’s coming up on the service. There may be a reason for that: This six-part series takes some… explanation to understand. Yes, the tone feels like one of those YouTube videos on how to create a pipe bomb, which would feel like narrator Peter Dinklage and company are drifting into dangerous territory. But that part is more a delivery mechanism to show just how brutal the most famous dictators of the past century really are.
HOW TO BECOME A TYRANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Scenes of various nations that have or have had dictators. “Absolute power. Come on, you know you want it,” says narrator Peter Dinklage. “You just don’t know how to get it.”
The Gist: How To Become A Tyrant is a six-part docuseries that takes a wiseass approach to the history of tyrants in the 20th and 21st centuries. The episodes basically break down how to gain power and — even more important — keep it, by giving the examples of the six most famous dictators of the past hundred or so years.
Each episode concentrates on a different dictator, through archival footage, expert interviews and animated recreations, but within each episode, Dinklage gives examples of how other dictators managed to do what each “chapter” focuses on.
The show starts with the dictator to end all dictators: Adolf Hitler. The chapter is called “Seize Power,” and it documents how Hitler went from a World War I soldier with a sweaty handshake to supreme leader of Germany by 1934. Much of it had to do with concepts that might be scarily familiar to people in 2021: Identify a group who is highly dissatisfied; foment anger at an enemy, whether it’s real or not; be a man of the people; brand your movement with symbols and a “uniform” to make people feel like part of a team; wait out your opportunity to strike.
In the second episode, Dinklage talks about how to keep power once you seize it. Through the story of Saddam Hussein, the chapter is entitled “Crush Your Rivals.” After he took ultimate power of Iraq in 1979 — after ten years as vice president, building coalitions of powerful friends — he set about killing, torturing and threatening anyone who he thought could topple him. This included close advisors and even family members. And his methods were ruthless, like the extended example of how he tortured a rival into calling out members of his party when he first rose tow power, and how Saddam made the ones that he didn’t give a death sentence to execute the ones he did.
The other episodes: “Reign Through Terror”, concentrating on Idi Amin; “Control The Truth”, concentrating on Joseph Stalin; “Create A New Society”, concentrating on Muammar Gaddafi; and “Rule Forever”, concentrating on the Kim dynasty in North Korea.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A weird, overproduced YouTube instructional video paired with a History Channel-style docuseries about dictators.
Our Take: Dinklage is one of the executive producers of How To Become A Tyrant, and his deep, somewhat snarky tone is a good fit for this weird docuseries. He’s supposed to be promoting tyranny while telling us how wrong and dangerous it is for society at the same time.
You have experts like Andrew Sullivan telling the audience how, at times, people like to be led by a strong hand, but at other times, the experts lay out how narcissistic these people were and how damaging their ruthlessness can be. To say that the show suffers from a bit of a tonal problem is an understatement.
The “handbook” conceit is a clever one, though, as is concentrating on one dictator per episode, trying to pair the skill with which the particular tyrant was most adept. The stories of how Saddam would use fear to get what he wanted, even when he didn’t kill the people he tried to keep on his side, sent chills up our spines.
But we found ourselves shaking our heads during the “Seize Power” episode, because everything the experts and Dinklage talked about regarding Hitler’s rise to power had some eerie parallels to the current day, right down to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch back in 1923. In this case, the handbook concept works the other way, telling those who view it that the signs are already there, and here are some others you need to watch for.
Despite the weirdness of the show’s tone, How To Become A Tyrant gives good capsule histories of how various dictators came to and stayed in power. It’s arranged in a way that illustrates that the way this usually happens doesn’t vary much from situation to situation, yet we never seem to recognize what’s going on as it’s happening.
Parting Shot: A preview of the Saddam Hussein episode, “Saddam Hussein answered the question on the minds of every new and vulnerable tyrant: How do you keep the wolves at bay?”
Sleeper Star: The animations were done by the firm 6 Point Harness, and they do a good job of illustrating some of the dictators’ most notorious moments while keeping up the dark tone of the series.
Most Pilot-y Line: The weird overall tone of the instructional narrative overrides any particularly strange line.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Yes, How To Become A Tyrant is a strange little show, but it presents some good historical information in a way that’s accessible, even though it’s not always explainable.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
