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The nameless narrator of Vladimir isn’t a completely hopeless case. Some of what she does in response to being asked to voluntarily step down from her teaching duties — or else a less voluntary complaint procedure will kick in — is a pretty good idea, or at least in the ballpark of one.
For example, she seeks out Lila, her estranged former student, and tells her how sincerely good the roman à clef about herself and John she’s been posting online is. Okay, so it’s a little funny that the nicest thing the professor can think to give someone is her own approval, but as an academic that’s more or less her currency, right? It’s better than crashing an alumni event uninvited and lecturing the university president’s wife about how she’s a 1950s-style ornament for male enjoyment when you don’t get your way, which the professor also does.
On a professional level, she turns her lecture class into a public forum on herself, her husband, and their unusual relationship, giving students free rein to ask any questions they want. Some of her answers go over like a lead balloon — for example, her unwillingness to condemn her husband’s relationships with students because they were consensual, and so to condemn them would be to condemn consensual sex by women. Her response to a student pointing out the inherent power imbalance in student-teacher relationships, that all relationships are imbalanced in multiple ways, doesn’t account for the authority John held over the students, as their department chair if not their direct professor.
Other responses pique the students’ interest, like when she adopts the term “polyamory” for her “open marriage”/“marital agreement” when it’s suggested by a student. Suddenly, a generation that almost every professor has spent the season complaining about is perfectly capable of seeing the commonalities between previous generations’ permissive sexual mores and their own. It’s just a matter of presentation, as education often is.
As a result of all this, she’s no longer under threat of being put under administrative leave over all the mishegas. But her classes will be supervised, one by a friendly professor and one by her frenemy, Flo. (Flo does not feel that term is an appropriate description.) She’ll be subject to biweekly evaluations, too. Why, it’s like tenure never happened!
All the while, her husband John’s all-important hearing is approaching. Yet every time she turns around, he’s not there, out every night with “a friend.” They’re both adults, they both know what that means, but the regularity of it, and John’s cryptic answers and distant demeanor, leaves the narrator curious.
“Who is this friend?” she asks. But by that point it’s not hard to guess. Following him to a rendezvous one night, she finds him being unmistakably physically flirtatious and intimate with none other than Cynthia, Vladimir’s wife. His later profession of ignorance when she asks him about her — “Which one’s Cynthia?” he replies unconvincingly — seals it: He’s having an affair, with the wife of the man the narrator wants to have an affair with.
The indignity is the final straw for her. She blows off John’s hearing for lunch with Vladimir after all, calling him “my love” (well, saying it to us anyway) when he arrives. It’s not the first time she’s referred to herself as being in love with the man, either, even though she knows her fantasy version of the man better than the man itself. Seriously, I bet she’s spent more time thinking about him rubbing a bitten plum against her décolletage than she has talking to him in person. This decision is romantic but rash, in a way that threatens her family’s future.
But can you blame her for not feeling there’s much of one at the moment, or not caring whether there is or isn’t? Her and John’s marriage, unconventional though it might be, had been rock-solid until now. Early in the episode there’s a scene where John comes across her fallen asleep atop the handwritten, in-progress manuscript for her next book, and he doesn’t snoop or pry at all. He respects her, as a person and as a writer. That’s meaningful.
But lying about Cynthia’s not part of the arrangement. It’s not hard to guess why he does it: Time and again, he’s made it clear he knows how his wife feels about Vladimir, so he knows she’ll be angry if she finds out he’s fucking Cynthia while she’s still stumbling around trying to snag Vlad. Or who knows, maybe he thinks they’re already having sex, and this relationship is retaliatory in some way. Everyone on campus seems envious of Vlad’s rock-star status, which every one of them used to enjoy at one point; why would John, the disgraced former department chair, be any different?
It’s 2026, and academia is under direct threat by the might of the United States government itself. An entire political party has sworn to destroy it. The Department of Education has been illegally dismantled. The most prestigious universities in the country are being shaken down for billion-dollar bribes. Public universities in red states are being turned into dark-age propaganda mills. Professors and students are being hounded and arrested for having the wrong views. Cancel culture exists, alright, but it has nothing to do with squeamish students who use they/the pronouns. The very people who decried censorship on campus are now working round the clock to destroy campus life altogether. Seen in that light, Vladimir is kinda fighting yesterday’s battle here.
I say all that mostly just to get it down on paper and out of the way, because I don’t think Vladimir can be dismissed as a didactic swipe at political correctness or what have you. The people making those arguments, John and Sid and the narrator, are not terribly sympathetic characters. Oh, they’re likeable, very much so. I especially want to shout out Ellen Robertson as Sid, the high-powered lawyer with the fashion sense and impulse control of a 15-year-old boy, who’s in there doing three-person work with Rachel Weisz and John Slattery and feels every bit as compelling and entertaining on screen. But if you told their story to your friends, your friends would take the other people’s side, guaranteed. This isn’t to say they don’t have valid points, however! It’s complicated!
Vladimir trusts you to be smart enough to properly weigh the advice of infantile people who are arguing that adults should not infantilize themselves. The narrator’s lust for Vladimir grants her keen insight into how human beings work behind closed doors and within their own minds, but it also clouds her judgment. Enough to chain Vladimir to a chair? It seems we’ll soon find out.
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.
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