2025 might be remembered as the year pop culture had to confront some hard political facts. Andor served the Star Wars audience tales of Bolshevikian plotting and bureaucratic fascism; even Superman had to grit his teeth and give a middle finger to Israel. Then again, maybe reality just finally sunk to the brain damaged level of a corporate franchise.

But the most important supervillain of 2025 could have been found on TV. No, it wasn’t on HBO’s The Penguin, to which it bears an unsubtle resemblance to, with its similarly scowling, misshapen anti- hero and gothed up female lead, and does feature an all-time performance by Colin Ferrell. But it’s Mussolini: Son of the Century, starring Luca Marinelli, that knows what a real bad guy is—and why people like them.

As a depiction of villainy, Son of the Century, an eight-episode saga directed by Joe Wright and released in the U.S. on Mubi, is an important victory against a pop culture dominated by corporate franchises and their overeager nerd minions. But even the well-considered Andor, which a friend once accurately described to me as ‘The Wire in Space,’ can’t handle the paradox that sometimes real world villainy is more cartoonish than it is on screen. (It doesn’t help that today’s crop of prestige TV, as Chapo Trap House’s Matt Christman once reminded us, is kind of overrated in the first place.)

Luckily, Marinelli’s lead performance as the titular Italian dictator in the years before he sent to the Upside Down is an absolute powerhouse, masterfully complimented by everything from the show’s art direction to its sound design. Unlike its HBO counterpart, Mussolini dispenses with the need to explain its villain with a psychological backstory, other than having him simply declare: “Coming from poverty, I love power. I detest poverty, and I despise the weak.” He’s an embittered ex-socialist whose only dialectic fluctuates between enforcing his vision of power over the world and saving his own skin. Hell, what’s more appealing, that or arguing with some guy in a cafe about Trotsky? He bangs a rich, hot goth (Benedetta Cimatti) and seems to despise his diminutive, pork-pied hatted chief toadie Masso as much as his nemesis, the King of Italy—or, as he calls him, the Dwarf. All he wants to do is smash that pesky liberal democracy for good.

He can’t do it alone, though. Marinelli’s Mussolini constantly breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience Fleabag-style; the gimmick works because it’s a literal demonstration of the implicit contract fascists make with their subjects. He doesn’t talk to us because he thinks we’ll actually believe him, but because he knows we’re still along for the ride anyways—we’re just dumb like that. It’s okay: we’ll keep drinking this garbage.

Director Joe Wright has spoken of the hard time he had finding distribution for the series due its controversial theme of fascism being bad, which may be the reason it hasn’t made its way to HBO and mainstream discourse as instead, on Mubi. As a result, despite great reviews, the show has flown under the radar: no r/sonofthecentury has sprung up to keep track of its dense historical politics, as is the case with most cable slop like The Penguin, which also has a dozen website writers grinding out episodic play by plays of its thoroughly mid plot (I think there was something about an orphan?).

But somehow Mussolini: Son of the Century is all strangely familiar: the torchlit meetings of early fascist and socialist groups amid a dystopian post-WW1 Rome recall The Warriors; the pad of Benito’s bourgeois mistress Margherita resembles a Tim Burton set. In one scene Mussolini trudges around his bathroom in a robe and chain, grumbling at his goomah while taking a leak like Tony Soprano. When he poses and speaks before a rowdy but malleable audience, he works the crowd like a pro wrestler. He even stagedives. Director Joe Wright pumps a soundtrack of heaters by Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands and utilizes every tool in Danny Boyle’s, Tarantino’s, and several other playbooks to supercharge Italy’s descent into the Cool Zone with glossy menace.

If Son of the Century seems too slick or makes fascism seem too seductive, that’s probably the point. The co-opting of avant garde movements gave the fascists plenty of cultural loot to flaunt, and slogans like, “You are everything and the opposite of everything,” probably just hit like crazy at the time. That and a cool uniform go a long way; the next thing you know you’ve got corporate funding.

Ironically, Mussolini: Son of the Century’s sadistic blackshirts—with their black turtlenecks, trench coats, and DIY skull and crossbones, are more comic book-y than anything in The Penguin— they even club people with dried, hardened fish, like ultraviolent versions of goons from an Adam West-era episode of Batman. It’s a reminder that the forces of fascism and right wing reaction have always been willing to weaponize their own performative absurdity. Before they donned hoods, the early KKK dressed as clowns and operated in a manner not unlike the Joker’s gang in Burton’s Batman. In the US today, the twitter accounts for the Trump regime traffic in gleeful, memeified sadism, overseen by their newish ringmaster Elon Musk, who always seems like he’s been taking cues not so much from actual Bond villains, as from the Simpson’s Hank Scorpio. The infamous picture of off-duty concentration camp guards posing cheerfully with an accordion starts to seem more and more like a precursor to what the internet now calls soyface. 

But Son of the Century can make fascism look as slick as it wants, because it actually understands it. Unlike something from the mind of Quintin Tarantino—a typical Gen X-er, who would never acknowledge something as uncool as right vs. left politics,and as a result fashions war movies that probably screen in IDF barracks—Wright’s series actually has something to say about the way people are violently addled and directed by cultural imagery. The show’s citizens live in a crumbling landscape surrounded by 2D renderings of their former glory as a Holy Empire, haunted and taunted by the past. Images from classical paintings loom over them like gods; puppet shows torment them like demonic imps. On the other hand, culture is frighteningly arbitrary: in one scene, it’s the frantic, dadaist scatting of a futurist poet that soundtracks a brutal montage of fascist terror attacks. 

But the series never fails to remind us that the blackshirts—who Mussolini refers to as the dogs—are just means to an end; it’s all about the guy on top. Mussolini, who ran a newspaper during the period the show depicts, was a reality artist, a media manipulator who specialized in curating the narrative. 

By the end of the show, he sits alone in a grand chamber, flies buzzing overhead, the room dominated by a black marble sculpture of his own head. The scene hums with a dark, mythological gravitas that Marvel or Disney could never summon. In the realm of fascism, image is everything.

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Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo and, more recently, David Dinkins.