The problem I’m having with Vladimir is that instead of reviewing it, I want to transcribe it. Adapting her own novel, writer-creator Julia May Jonas alternates aphoristic quips, keen interpersonal observations, and steamily subtle come-ons with such alacrity that I don’t think a review can do it justice. People use the phrase “thrill ride” to describe action movies, but with one gleefully surprising line after another, Vladimir earns the title.
This episode sees Rachel Weisz’s still-unnamed professor character intercede on behalf of her husband, John, who’s been suspended for having sexual relationships with his students. If an upcoming hearing goes poorly for him, he’ll lose his pension, which he’s mere months away from earning. If they can kick the can down the road to the summer, he’ll get his pension and take his lumps happily. But John needs his wife’s help. Cryptically, he says this is because a woman named Lila has joined the complaint against him, a revelation that seems to compel the professor into cooperating.
And once she’s in, she is in. She goes so far as to threaten to expose her affair with her colleague David to his wife, who’s still in the dark about it, unless he gets her an audience with the university higher-ups. David, who finds the conversation “disappointing,” has no choice but to agree. What did our humble narrator see in this sad sack? “He has an enormous cock,” she confides to us. There are worse reasons to have an affair, I suppose!
David sets the professor up with Lynn (Kari Matchett), the wife of the college president. Hugely inappropriate throughout their conversation — she goes on and on about how beautiful the narrator is, and says she’s glad she slept with one of her profs when she was in college because it gave her experience with an uncircumcised penis — she is charmed by the professor into delaying his hearing till the summer, basically leting him off the hook
John being John, he fucks this up immediately. Out at a bar with his date for the night, who is much younger despite his protestations that he stopped shtupping students a decade ago, he encounters Lynn and her husband Steve, aka Mr. President (Chris Handfield). Moronically, John doesn’t pay the tab and run the second he sees them, so he gets caught red-handed. His wife swore that he’d changed his ways and that she could keep him under control, and may even have believed it, but so much for that.
Meanwhile, the professor’s reputation on campus continues to deteriorate. Her colleagues keep gossiping about her, bemoaning her lack of self-respect. Students are abandoning her once standing-room-only course on American women writers, including Edwina (Mallori Johnson), a student she advises and clearly thinks the world of. Her own daughter Sid has gone a step further and is barely speaking with her. And oh, that barista or whatever who allegedly hates her because she failed her? That would be the aforementioned Lila, with whom it seems the good professor had a complicated relationship herself. Easy there, Lydia Tàr!
Small wonder that the professor takes to Vladimir like a drowning woman to oxygen. He’s new, he’s sexy, his book (which is half the size of hers) turns out to be incredible, and he’s very obviously interested in her. It’s got to be nice to get some positive feedback of any kind, let alone the kind Vladimir’s giving her. At one point, he encourages her to kickstart her stalled writing career by thinking of writing as something “secret and dirty,” just for her. I mean, come on.
All the while, his body language around her is so obviously seductive in nature it’s like a physical sext. There’s a great recurring sight gag of him peacocking by placing his arms behind his head when he talks. No one’s done that for the professor in years!
And the narrator objectifies Vladimir like he’s a slab of beef. She stares at his dick through his pants when he spills a drop of his martini on them. In one powerfully erotic moment that we don’t know is a fantasy until it’s over, the professor leans in close and smells his sweaty armpit. It may be just a daydream, but Vladimir makes it clear to her he’s open to making some dreams come true.
Are there red flags? Sure, you could say that. His delayed interest in reading her book, for example, compared to his enthusiasm for her husband’s. (Everyone on this show has written exactly one book, which is funny to me, a person who has written exactly one book.) The weird vibes with his wife Cynthia, who encouraged him to drink with the professor last episode but is angered to find him drunk with her in this one.
There are repeated references to Cynthia having some kind of terrible, nearly fatal mental health or substance abuse crisis when their daughter was two; Cynthia is none to happy to learn Vladimir already divulged this to the narrator. Of course, his own relationship and parenting problems seem likely to push him into the professor’s arms as much as the reverse.
As it stands, the professor departs their intense conversation at a faculty drink-up, races home, ends fifteen years of writer’s block by scrawling out her smutty fantasy about fucking him in the bar’s bathroom, then masturbates with gusto…while ignoring six calls from Sid, with whom she’d desperately been trying to reconnect. Horniness has a uniquely powerful ability to recalibrate your priorities.
Oh right, then someone breaks into her backyard and tackles her into her pool while she’s out there having a post-masturbation smoke. Your guess as to what that’s all about is as good as mine!
Despite not yet being particularly explicit — nothing here approaches Industry levels of filth at the moment — Vladimir is a powerfully sexy show. The blushingly frank dialogue is often spoken right at us, as if the narrator is a friend who’s kissing and telling over a couple of drinks. Her twitterpated chemistry with Vladimir radiates heat, as does the way she gazes at and fantasizes about his body. And it’s hard to complain about spending half an hour looking at Rachel Weisz, Leo Woodall, Jessica Henwick, and John Slattery; as was the case with Slattery and his castmates on Mad Men, the physical beauty of the performers is an artistically integral aspect of the show, as much as the wardrobe or the lighting or the cinematography.
But again, without actually hearing the way Jonas’s dialogue slinks and flitters from one intriguing idea and unexpected angle to the next, you can’t really understand Vladimir’s appeal. “Adapted from the sexy novel, starring a stacked cast, and not very good” is practically a genre unto itself, after all, but it’s not a genre to which this show belongs at all. Vladimir is a secret and dirty delight.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
