Two New Comedies Try to Make Sex on Campus Funny Again
In the series premiere of Netflix’s Vladimir, Rachel Weisz awakens from troubled sleep to a cascade of texts, sighs deeply, and addresses the camera with pleading eyes. “All I want is a life free of complications,” says her unnamed lead. “If I can’t have power, can I at least be free from other people’s drama? Free from their behavior? Free from their needs and desires?”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]It feels appropriate that free appears four times in this monologue, one of the character’s many fourth-wall-shattering asides. She is a blocked novelist who teaches English at a liberal arts college. And there is no setting more emblematic of freedom—and its discontents—than the campus, where tenure is supposed to protect the intellectual liberty of faculty and students living independently for the first time try on new ideas and identities. Among the most common school mottos is veritas vos liberabit: the truth will set you free.
If only we could agree on what constitutes freedom or truth. Because we never have, higher education has always been a battleground. Protest has defined academia for generations, from civil rights and the Vietnam War in the 1960s to the ongoing friction between supporters of Israel and Palestine. But perhaps the longest-running conflict within higher ed, one that continues to draw the attention of outsiders who haven’t set foot on a grassy quad in decades, surrounds freedom as it’s practiced on campus. Should free speech be an absolute right in the classroom, even if it’s false or hurtful? Should faculty and students be free to interact in any way they choose, including sexually?
These questions are not new to fiction. But storytellers—many of whom, including Vladimir’s creator and the author of the novel it’s based on, Julia May Jonas, also teach—have paid them particular attention of late. Since the #MeToo movement and the debatably existent phenomenon known as cancel culture seemingly shifted the balance of power on campus, books like Mary Adkins’ Privilege, movies like After the Hunt, and TV series like The Chair have measured the ramifications when students call out teachers for misconduct, whether sexual or pedagogical. These stories lean tragic; the accused, the accuser, and maybe a complicit bystander come out worse than they went in.
Vladimir and HBO’s Rooster, which premieres on March 8, break that pattern. Though stylistically dissimilar, each is a true comedy that finds humor in how sex scandals destabilize earnest, intellectual, insular academic communities. And each dares to honor the humanity in characters often reduced to predators and prey by one faction, shrill social justice warriors and brave free thinkers by another. The nuance is refreshing but oddly timed, as though it took unprecedented government interference with freedoms taken for granted on campus for those inside their walls to give each other grace.
Rape isn’t funny, so it helps that neither show strains to make it so. These liaisons are consensual but fraught by infidelity, disparities in age and power, shifting norms. Rooster keeps its engagement with these issues particularly light. The series is less a satire of academia than it is a workplace comedy in the mold of co-showrunner Bill Lawrence’s recent hits Ted Lasso and Shrinking. As in those sitcoms, our hero is a single, aimless, middle-aged dad. This flawed man is also kind and generous, by sharing the wisdom he’s gained over a lifetime’s worth of mistakes, he fosters a community of blunderers helping each other become better people.
Rooster puts a slightly more prestige-coded spin on the Lawrence formula. A timid author who is insecure about his lack of formal education and has yet to recover from his divorce five years earlier, protagonist Greg channels his fantasies into pulpy best-sellers about a stud named Rooster. The character might’ve been insufferable if he weren’t played by Steve Carell, the man who made us enjoy seven seasons with Michael Scott. His daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), is a professor whose Russian-scholar husband Archie’s (Ted Lasso’s preening Jamie Tartt, Phil Dunster) affair with a grad student—not Archie’s student, mind you—has made them the subject of rampant gossip on their small New England campus. Greg’s visit to check on her quickly turns into a writer-in-residence gig, fueled by the machinations of the college’s wellness-obsessed man’s-man president (John C. McGinley).
Lawrence and co-showrunner Matt Tarses poke friendly fun at progressive sexual mores. While male instructors are constantly defending their innocent missteps to administrators (Greg calls a querulous girl “my white whale” and is reported for body-shaming), female students boast about conquests and aggressively pursue crushes. Katie becomes a cause célèbre for a younger feminist and is mortified to see her face on T-shirts. We’ve seen versions of these jokes before, but none are mean-spirited, and at least they feel fresher than Rooster’s broader political gags. A scene where vegans and gun-control activists scream at each other in a double-booked “free speech zone” could’ve been plucked out of that 32-year-old parody of political correctness on campus, PCU.
Mostly, though, Archie’s indiscretion serves as a conduit to character comedy about well-meaning screw-ups trying to make good. The ensemble is large and charming. Greg gets a love interest, a poet played by Danielle Deadwyler; goofy students are to him what soccer players are to Coach Lasso. Far from a stereotypical homewrecker, Archie’s paramour (Lauren Tsai) is a blunt, hyper-logical scientist. There are brief but delightful appearances by Connie Britton and Robby Hoffman. The only remarkable thing about Rooster, really, is that it treats a campus rocked by teacher-student sex as just another backdrop.
For Vladimir, whose very title brings to mind Lolita author and Cornell professor Vladimir Nabokov, the academic setting is the point. (It also features a college-town bakery named after Lolita’s cast-aside mom, Charlotte Haze.) It’s the superior of the two shows, in large part because of Weisz’s performance, which seduces the viewer with sensuality and humor, only to shock us with unhinged behavior. But what gives it the thematic resonance Rooster never reaches for is Jonas’ psychological insight into a place steeped in art and ideas that still gets bogged down in bureaucracy and appearances—where the idealism of youth meets the experience of age and passion is championed in theory but policed in practice.
Our introduction to Weisz’s character is alarming. Gliding around a cabin in a nightie, she laments that she’s aged out of her power to arouse men, as a ruggedly handsome younger man chained to a chair in a cardigan and boxer briefs starts screaming. (Let’s presume Weisz’s assessment of her attractiveness is proof she’s an unreliable narrator.) Then we flash back six weeks, and her charisma makes us forget that she might be a monster.
Once the English department’s “golden couple,” she and her rakish husband, John (a perfectly cast John Slattery), have, like Archie and Katie but worse, become pariahs following complaints from former students with whom he had sexual relationships. These women were all enthusiastically consenting adults. And it all happened at least a decade ago, before the school had rules against faculty-student fraternization. Still, John is now facing a dismissal hearing. His wife is either pitied, by those who don’t know they have an open marriage, or deemed complicit. In an ironic knife-twist, the department’s proceedings against John are led by David (Matt Walsh), a colleague for whom Weisz’s character nearly left her husband many years earlier. He’s since devolved into a milquetoast who spills cheese curls and then eats them off the floor.
Our antiheroine deals with these indignities by developing an erotic obsession with the department’s new, also-married hire, Vladimir (Leo Woodall). We’re privy to her feverish fantasies of the two of them luridly pressed up against each other. A buzzy novelist with a volatile writer wife
(Jessica Henwick) who leans on him for support and childcare, Vlad is tantalizingly opaque. His texts and puppy-dog grins could be flirtatious or innocent. If we didn’t recognize him as the man who’s restrained in the opening scene, the protagonist’s vacation in the land of delulu might seem harmless.
Vladimir’s comedy gets as dark and sticky as tar. As in After the Hunt, power dynamics are complex, hypocrisy runs rampant, and almost everyone is implicated. But Jonas departs from that film’s cynicism—not just because she wrings so much hilarity out of the sex, ambition, and classic literary archetypes that are as real to these scholars as their own lives, but because she understands that a person doesn’t need to be evil to hurt others. The selfish pursuit of pleasure is often motivation enough, whether the pain attaches to a stymied ex-girlfriend of John’s or the couple’s adult daughter, who learns more about her parents’ sex lives than she wanted to know. This is a harsher version of Rooster’s insistence that anyone can be rehabilitated, one that acknowledges that some damage is irreparable, and that the people who benefit from infinite patience and forgiveness are usually men of privilege.
Vladimir the show is significantly lighter than Vladimir the book. Maybe that’s because genres are more strictly defined in TV. But the discrepancy also reflects a shift that has taken place since the novel was published, in 2022. #MeToo has faded from the news cycle, replaced by wars abroad, an affordability crisis at home, and a second Trump term that has wreaked havoc on communities more vulnerable than the typical college girl. For better and worse, emotions have cooled. Guys like John and Archie don’t have to be cartoon villains; as long as their transgressions aren’t monstrous enough to be immortalized in the Epstein files, like the names of some prominent professors, they can be funny and pitiful and broken and human.
At the same time, higher ed is facing external threats that make its internal conflicts seem quaint. A right-wing assault on education that began with book bannings and attacks on critical race theory in public schools has leveled up to federal lawsuits and funding cuts aimed at private universities for such offenses as allowing students to protest. Suddenly, the question isn’t philosophical but existential—not what intellectual freedom looks like but whether it can survive in any form. If tweedy free-speech absolutists and their aggrieved students are capable of finding common ground, this will be the issue that unites them. It will also change the stories we set within the easily lampooned groves of academe, and make these shows feel like relics of a more innocent time.