At first blush, a TV show with Russian vibes featuring John Slattery should give us pause.
If you’re a card-carrying prestige TV drama nerd, you’ll know that I’m referring to Slattery’s participation in The Romanoffs, Matthew Weiner’s ill-fated anthology show that to date is his one-and-done follow-up to Mad Men.
Speaking of Mad Men, that’s one of many reasons to love Slattery, of course. Roger Sterling represents everything I want out of television.
But let’s take a step back and begin at the begin.
This new show called Vladimir – what is it?
It’s a new Netflix limited series, a dramedy consisting of eight episodes that’ll all get rolled out on March 5th, 2026.
The logline, as they say in the biz (I think?), is as follows: A woman’s life spirals as she develops an obsession with her alluring coworker. Her determination to make her fantasies real leads to dark, humorous, and complicated situations.
Vladimir is based on the novel of the same name by Julia May Jonas, which has received lots of “darkly funny” accolades.
You mentioned Slattery. Say more of the cast of which you speak
Gladly, as the Vladimir cast is rather stacked. The pedigree is such, in fact, that we can see a trendline where Netflix is trying to poke further into the prestige-y space which is more typically dominated by HBO (which is about to enter its own strange days following Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery) and Apple TV among the streaming titans.
The “woman” in question is an unnamed character played by Rachel Weisz, who feels like she’s been around forever and slips seamlessly into any role she takes on. Perhaps I have special regard for her as she co-stars in The Mummy, which was among the small and heavily used collection of DVDs my wife and I owned when we first lived together and were on a very modest budget.
The titular Vladimir is played by Leo Woodall, a rising star and intriguing casting choice. The White Lotus is jam packed with outstanding performances each season, and even so Woodall stood out in Season 2 as Jack, a seemingly British frat boy type who has a lot more than sex in paradise on his mind while wooing Haley Lu Richardson’s Portia.
Get back to the Slattery of it all
I’m tying a few threads together here, but it looks like Weisz’s character is married to Slattery’s character, though they have something of an “arrangement.” And as the official trailer clearly conveys, things go off the rails in all kinds of fun + dark ways when old Vladdy boy enters their world.
It’s set in the world of academia, which should be fun
College is such a great setting for stories, though recent television forays in this direction have been something of a mixed bag.
The Chair, starring Sandra Oh and Jay Duplass, was rather promising, but was weirdly canceled by Netflix after just one season.
Lucky Hank, another campus-based dramedy from the same year (2023), was thankfully canceled after just the one season because, unluckily enough, it was terrible. And I sat through the entire thing simply based on Bob Odenkirk playing Hank and my hope that it would somehow get better.
In any event, we’re also getting the very promising-looking campus-adjacent Rooster, starring Steve Carell, which premieres on HBO just three days after Vladimir, on March 8th.
See you around the quad.