I've said it before and I'll say it again – stick an Oscar-winning actor in your Netflix series and you automatically have my interest. Sure, not every Oscar win is quite the same as the others (we all know the Academy isn't always consistent), but broadly speaking it's a great way to assume you'll get good performances as a minimum.
That's good news for Vladimir – a new, very saucy-looking drama starring none other than Rachel Weisz (who got an Oscar for her performance in The Constant Gardener back in early 2006 and a nomination for The Favourite some time later. She's a brilliant actress on her day, and looks like she's having fun in this new role.
Based on a best-selling novel of the same name, Weisz stars as the enigmatically-described M, a formerly successful writer and professor who feels like her professional existence is starting to drift a little. As the trailer makes clear, her relationship with her husband (John Slattery) is falling apart amid an affair of his, and she's not exactly feeling very fulfilled.
When she encounters a young writer, Leo Woodall as Vladimir, she seems to pretty quickly fall into an intense and very adult version of the crushes we've all been through in our lives. She begins to fantasise about encounters with him, all the while getting closer to him in the real world – and it looks pretty clearly like we'll see the line between daydreams and reality start to blur.
It's pretty likely that things will progress into murky territory – from some clips in the trailer it seems like Vladimir is happy to lead M along into her fantasies, but we have no real way of knowing whether that's real or imagined. That makes it a really fun premise, not least since it gives the showrunners license to make a whole bunch of love scenes without needing them to be credible.
The show will arrive on Netflix on 5 March, and should run to eight episodes in total, so this looks like definition of a limited series rather than one that could go on forever – if that sounds great, add it to your watchlist now.
