Rachel Weisz As a Sex-Starved Professor? What Could Go Wrong?

If for some reason Steve Carell’s new academic comedy Rooster doesn’t have enough sexual appeal for you, there’s a new Netflix series also set in the world of academia that, on paper, sounds incredible. In Vladimir, Rachel Weisz stars as an older literature professor married to a colleague, John (John Slattery). John, however, is in the midst of a sex scandal: Half a dozen former undergrads from a decade ago have come forward about affairs they had with him, and the fallout is threatening his pension.

Weisz’s character, M, is not that bothered by it, however, because she and John had “an arrangement.” She’s mostly concerned with how the scandal affects her specifically — one of the students John slept with, for instance, was enrolled in her class, and there’s a claim that M denied the former undergrad a grant out of jealousy.

Meanwhile, M is mostly focused on trying to sleep with a much younger professor, Vladimir (Leo Woodall, One Day, The White Lotus). Vladimir seems interested in M at times, but he’s also married to another fellow professor, Cynthia (Jessica Henwick), and keeps sending mixed signals — which only deepens M’s obsession as her husband fights his misconduct allegations. John and M’s daughter, Sid (Ellen Robertson), is a lawyer representing her father at the hearing, which introduces yet another complication.

The series, based on a novel by Skidmore theater professor Julia May Jonas — who also developed the adaptation — is rich with possibilities. The politics of academia are catnip. Unfortunately, everything Vladimir is trying to say was said much better in last year’s Luca Guadagnino’s sexually-charged After the Hunt. Even the pilot episode of Rooster tackled the generational friction between students and faculty more incisively.

What’s left is a tepid, anticlimactic meditation on desire and the desperate search for mid-life reinvention through sex. Weisz is as good as you’d expect, but Leo Woodall — bless his heart — isn’t nearly formidable enough to hold his own opposite her. He doesn’t even land as an academic himbo. Slattery, ironically, is almost the more interesting character: a charismatic cad, a John Slattery type, completely unbothered by the scandal swirling around him except insofar as it might cost him his pension.

The book was probably better, because M’s sexual fantasies and fourth-wall-breaking asides drain the story of whatever gravity it’s reaching for — but it doesn’t work as a comedy, either. It’s just … thoroughly mediocre, and an otherwise unconscionable waste of a genuinely great cast.