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. Jonas wrote, created, and executive produced the series, hence why it retains all of the original’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’s devotion to rug-pulling) but from his wife and other members of their faculty and peer group, male and female.
