Vladimir, a subversive eight-episode series, charts a middle-aged professor’s all-consuming obsession with her younger colleague.
No matter how mischievous or unhinged her fantasies may be, they unfurl onscreen as she cooks dinner or zones out during a faculty meeting, providing an intoxicating escape from her stale reality. “It explores what women feel like they’re allowed to desire, and how they’re allowed to desire,” says Julia May Jonas, who helms the show, adapted from her 2022 novel. The protagonist’s crush is contagious, and her eight-episode undoing pulls you in like a riptide.
When we meet the unnamed protagonist, she’s feeling out of step. Her writing career has stalled, and each semester, fewer people sign up for her once-legendary capstone course. Even her only daughter, Sid, keeps her at arm’s length.
She no longer feels sexually desired, which strips her of an agency and a power she once wielded deftly and often. Her marriage to a fellow professor is also sluggish, after years of being in an open relationship. She also has just learned that the liberal arts college where she’s taught contemporary fiction for decades is bringing a sexual assault case against him. . His dalliances — which happened a decade ago and which he believed were consensual — involved students.
It’s against this backdrop that the protagonist is swept up by an all-powerful crush on Vladimir, a hot-shot young writer, who, along with his enigmatic wife, Cynthia (Jessica Henwick), joins the faculty. The protagonist quickly falls down a rabbit hole of obsession.
Led by this slippery, inscrutable narrator, Vladimir offers an antihero to root for, a heightened depiction of how it feels to get older as a woman, and a winking sense of mischief and sexiness.
Vladimir is available to stream on Netflix from 5th March 2026.
Vladimir is available to stream on Netflix from 5th March 2026.