Vladimir is that rare visitor to the screen – proper television for proper grownups. The eight-part adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s provocative 2022 debut novel of the same name has not shied away from the properties that made the book great – black comedy, bleak insight, evisceration of accepted pieties – and fitted them perfectly to the new form. The screenwriter, Jeanie Bergen, who has obviously absorbed the book into her very bones, retains all of Jonas’s wit, confidence and, crucially, her willingness to dwell in grey areas and luxuriate in the complexities that govern life in middle age.
She also has Rachel Weisz, giving an unswervingly brilliant performance as the unnamed protagonist, a tenured English professor beloved by her students, whose husband, John (John Slattery, playing his one part, but he does it so well and so much better than anyone else, who are we to object to seeing it again?), another tenured academic on the same campus – has just been suspended for sleeping with students. His defence is that this was before the rules changed. “It was a different time” is a recurring phrase – not just from him (for here is the beginning of Jonas and Bergen’s devotion to rug-pulling) but from his wife and other members of their faculty and peer group, male and female.
Weisz’s character has always known about John’s affairs. They have always had, as she puts it, “an arrangement – what kids today would call an open marriage, but without all the awful communication”. Which is a line so great you may wish to set it aside as a treasure to be admired for years to come, for its infinite accrued wisdom and compression of an entire generational divide from the mouth of a character accustomed to privileging intellect over emotion.
It is this trait that finds her unprepared for falling in lust with the new guy at work – a bright, hot young thing called Vladimir (Leo Woodall), who is fun, charming, mildly flirtatious – but maybe with everyone? He is also married, to Cynthia, a bright, hot young thing who is now on track for English professorship, too, and an increasingly attractive option for our heroine/anti-heroine’s students. The power of students to decide adult fates not just through complaints of sexual harassment but by enrolling in one class over another forms another strand of the ever-thickening narrative web.
But it is the differing attitudes between the generations to John’s activities that provide the most torque. As the number of complainants grows, our professor is beset on all sides by gossip, conflicting opinions and the need to navigate the route between self-protection (which can also mean protecting John, if only to preserve his pension), the protection of her family (especially her daughter Sid, played by Ellen Robertson) and justice.
But what does justice look like? “It’s very hard for me to understand,” Weisz says, musing on John’s accusers in one of her character’s many addresses to camera – another thing that in lesser productions doesn’t work but here does, beautifully – “how consensual affairs that were fun not despite of the power dynamic but because of it could be thought of as hurtful or damaging after the fact. As a fellow female, I’m a little offended.”
Later, when she is talking to the college president’s wife, trying to get the harassment hearing postponed until after John has retired, they bond over golden memories of their own affairs with lecturers (“It was a different time”). Are they deluding themselves? Saving themselves? Seeing an inconvenient erotic truth at the core of this common human experience? Earlier, our protagonist noted that she is unlikely to have power – be it sexual, intellectual (as she tries in vain to get her students to connect with Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca when all they can see is the misogyny of its era) or otherwise – over anyone again at her age. So is she acting out of envy, or rage?
The show is interested in all of the above. Part of its power is its insistence that none of us are pure in motive, clear in our conscience, or honest with ourselves or others; nor do we treat life with the respect it deserves and the people we meet with the compassion they require. We contain multitudes, and nothing is black or white. And whatever young people think now, they will learn this too – and probably sooner than they would like.
