Inkoo Kang reviews the new Netflix series based on Julia May Jonas’s darkly comic campus novel, starring Rachel Weisz, John Slattery, and Leo Woodall.
The initial scene inspires little faith. M looks into the camera and addresses the viewer directly, bemoaning the woes of middle age . Her adult daughter no longer needs her. Her students find her lectures passé.
Worst of all, she may never again provoke a “spontaneous erection” since, “as an older woman—truly, what is more embarrassing—I will have lost the ability to captivate.” Coming from someone who looks like Rachel Weisz, one of the most gorgeous women alive, such sentiments are a little hard to swallow. Being taken into M’s confidence feels like being cornered at a party by the least self-aware person in the room. Later, she remarks that the scope of her Women in American Fiction class is “a bit broad,” then adds, lest we miss her brilliant wit, “that was a pun.” Despite this unpromising start, “Vladimir”—adapted from the 2022 novel of the same name by its author, Julia May Jonas, and the showrunner Kate Robin—proves strangely compelling. Even when we think we know where the series is going, it remains as slippery as its unreliable narrator, difficult to nail down in both genre and intent. Much of the early fun lies in the gap between how M thinks she comes across and how she actually does. In the pilot, she crows about the harvest salad she brings to a faculty retreat—a “real fuck-you salad,” she intimates to us, “the kind that makes everyone a bit embarrassed about what they brought.” It’s beautiful, but it goes untouched. When her “best and favorite” student opts to take a course with Vladimir’s wife, Cynthia , in lieu of M’s own, she assures the girl that Women in American Fiction is oversubscribed anyway. The numbers say otherwise. “Vladimir” is about as invested in the mores of the university as “The Morning Show” is in the mechanics of the newsroom. The adaptation retains traces of its literary roots—there are multiple nods to Nabokov, including a bakery named after Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother—but its bookishness is mostly window dressing. The show’s depiction of the ivory tower is full of improbable dramas: one subplot involves a texted request for a letter of recommendation sent at 11 P.M. and fulfilled within the hour. M struggles with an unshakable case of writer’s block that set in fifteen years ago, after the publication of her acclaimed first novel. Vladimir, who’s working on his sophomore effort, is more dismayed than soothed when she says of tenure, “Once you get it, you never have to go anywhere else.” M isn’t just a creature of the academy, but its happy captive. While her husband charms their daughter and her partner by holding forth on the Kardashians as the Greek tragedies of our times, M would probably be content forever teaching “Rebecca”—a text that one of her students declares unrelatable because it features “a mousy-ass woman married to a toxic man.” Her fear that her professional irrelevance has come too soon—an anxiety not often explored in Hollywood’s midlife-crisis narratives—is unexpectedly affecting. That feeling of obsolescence comes to a head when a half-dozen former students lodge complaints of inappropriate behavior against John. M’s adoring acolytes reassure her that she doesn’t “have to do the whole supportive-wife thing”—but, once she declines to distance herself from him, she begins to be seen as complicit herself. The series is largely sympathetic to M’s nostalgia for an era when affairs between teachers and students were “fun not despite the power dynamic, but because of the power dynamic,” and her pupils are believably overbearing in their certainty that rigid moral frameworks can be applied to any relationship. They also exhibit a boner-killing tendency to label every impulse with hyper-specific jargon; one boy asks for an extension on a paper because he was busy coming out as “gynesexual,” or attracted to femininity in any gender. While she decries the way today’s young women seem to deny their own sexual agency, she’s desperate to assert her own. When Vladimir confesses that he and his wife have had a fight, she looks downright hopeful as she asks, “About me?” The series follows M down this rabbit hole, less interested in relitigating the #MeToo movement than in showing what happens when a woman’s lust becomes an imperfect vehicle for self-renewal. At first, it’s easier to fantasize about Vladimir in hackneyed, uncomplicated erotic scenarios than to confront her domestic reality, which bristles with decades of pent-up resentments. But when Vladimir divulges Cynthia’s history of depression or overburdens her with child care, you start to wonder if M just has a thing for assholes. At least John—who strongly recalls Roger Sterling, Slattery’s “Mad Men” character—boasts a roguish charisma; Vladimir is such a drip that even his wife muses aloud that he could benefit from the life experience of having an affair. That Vladimir never deserves M’s admiration is beside the point. It’s desire itself that resuscitates her, even when wanting someone so badly makes humiliation unavoidable. M inadvertently drops hints that she thinks about Vladimir constantly; when he texts her an emoji, she has to ask her daughter what it means. But he’s less important as a lover than as a muse. After meeting him, M begins to write again—though, because the show seldom shies from absurdity, she pens the entire manuscript by hand, filling dozens of legal pads. Fittingly, she takes them to bed: in the end, she’s most intoxicated by her own thoughts. ♦
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