Me Too, one of the most famous political slogans of the 21st century, was a show of solidarity. For victims of abuse it was evidence that there were others out there who had endured the same experiences and survived. But what was less described, during the long process of recriminations, was the solidarity in the communities of the accused. Friends standing by their friends, parents standing by their children, wives standing by their husbands. That’s the jumping off point for Vladimir, a new Netflix limited series based on Julia May Jonas’s provocative 2022 bestselling novel.
Rachel Weisz is an unnamed creative writing professor at some semi-rural liberal arts college. She lives with her feckless husband, and fellow academic, John (John Slattery), ceaselessly narrating her mundane domestic and professional life. But two things happen to shake up their existence. Firstly, John is accused of a string of affairs with young students and placed on leave pending a hearing. And secondly, a new visiting tutor, Vladimir (Leo Woodall), arrives, bringing with him a rippling torso and new temptations – as well as his frosty wife Cynthia (Jessica Henwick) and a toddler. “Marriage is hard, divorce is hard,” Vladimir tells his gawping colleague. “Choose your hard.”
This is a setting in which sex remains an ever-present aspiration and frustration. “I may not be the cause of a spontaneous erection ever again,” Weisz laments. Her libido is undiminished – she is still perpetually on the verge of orgasm – yet she is tipping ever more into fantasy. That’s even though she and John have an “arrangement”, which leads her to stand by her man as the accusations mount up. And here Vladimir starts to show its teeth: even in this apparently cosmopolitan milieu, friends and colleagues are more judgemental of her solidarity with John than of his transgressions. She finds herself shamed, ostracised and, eventually, implicated. But the Hillary Clinton role doesn’t suit her and so she leans into her obsession with the Adonis in the office next door, the Tolstoy/Tarzan hybrid, Vladimir.
It feels like every TV show these days – whether it’s The White Lotus, Industry, Euphoria or The Boys – aspires to be “post-woke”. Vladimir, set in the sort of American college environment that rust belt Americans fear is an incubator of militant transgenderism, wants to challenge the preconceptions of the modern era. A student elicits an eye roll when he comes out as “gynosexual”, an attraction to femininity regardless of gender, while prissy Cynthia is hopped up on “melatonin gummies”. The contrast between the emotional timidity of today’s youth and the sexual liberation of the 20th century is, in the jaded eyes of the faculty, stark. “We were being good anti-establishment radicals,” Weisz tells her husband, looking back on their open marriage. “We didn’t want to accept the status quo.” Even with a few twists and turns, Vladimir feels late to the party of dunking on “snowflakes”.
Yet the show handles the first part of its subversion admirably. If the title evokes Vladimir Nabokov, the great emigre author of Lolita, then the plot is reminiscent of more recent disgraced college professor narratives by heavyweights like JM Coetzee and Philip Roth, which all took the perspective of the man dealing with the fallout. This is not Disgrace or The Dying Animal; John’s perspective is secondary, his demise a prop for his wife’s disintegration. But the faux edginess feels a bit hack in 2026, when so many writers are already pushing back against the, largely self-imposed, boundaries of political correctness and diversity. Weisz, meanwhile, is a terrific actor (even if her American accent occasionally hits those Rs like a back wheel bumping the curb when parking) and the chemistry with Vladimir feels, rightly, elliptical. But she is an unlikeable protagonist – her decision-making at times even sociopathic – and the tone of the show, its frequent collapse of the fourth wall, can be grating. Your tolerance for that device might correlate with your judgement of the show's rather unhinged ending.
But the biggest problem that Vladimir faces is the imposition of the Netflix aesthetic standard. The show is packed with recognisable contemporary pop hits (from Chappell Roan to Doechii) and filmed in a colour palette that scorches the retinas. It dulls the edge of iconoclasm that Jonas’s scripts are inching towards. How would Nabokov – whose spectre haunts both heroine and author – have forged Humbert Humbert or Charles Kinbote against these creative prescriptions? Vladimir is brisk, easy to watch, and occasionally droll, but any higher aspirations have been brutally muted.
