At the end of last year, I spoke with the writer Dennis Kelly, known for his series such as Utopia and Pulling. He was promoting his phenomenal BBC drama, Waiting for the Out, when he made the following comment:
"The amount of times you see one of these Netflix-type things – look, I've done this as well, so I'm not slagging it off too much – but someone wakes up and they're in a crime scene or something, and then you flash back, and it's like, what you're saying to the audience is, 'This is boring, right? But don't worry, you're going to see someone die.' You just think, 'F**king hell, that's so lame.'"
It's important to note, Kelly wasn't speaking about any one drama or Netflix series in particular. He certainly wasn't speaking about Vladimir, which wouldn't be released for a number of months after we spoke. However, to my mind, he may as well have been.
Weisz's character, an unnamed professor, speaks with the audience throughout, and that aspect of the series is present from the off. In the first scene, Weisz's character is seen writing in a cabin. She reveals to us that her students find her out of touch, her daughter finds her "entire personhood useless", and that she worries she "may not be the cause of a spontaneous erection ever again".
"What the f**k?!", he yells in terror as the title card comes up. We then flash back for the rest of the series, to the point at which Weisz's character meets Vladimir, and the story progresses.
Throughout, I found my own opinion of the series shifting – at first, it seemed as though the series wasn't wrestling with its knotty subject matter intently enough, but these conversations did emerge in later episodes.
The bits to camera, and moments at which we found we were watching the character's fantasies rather than reality, felt overused and then underused. At one point, I began to wonder whether a more substantial rug-pull was on the way, and we would find out Vladimir's interest in the central character was imagined, but this never materialised.
No matter how intense the character's obsession got with her co-worker, it still felt like a stretch to have the character go so far off the deep end that she would kidnap and abuse him.
To keep him there, as she plied him with more alcohol, she also drugged his drink. Once he was knocked out, she sent a text from his phone to his wife, Cynthia, telling her that he knew she was having an affair with John (she wasn't, but that's a whole other issue) and not to contact him.
It was set up for a final episode where all bets were off. I genuinely had no idea where things were going or how this would be resolved.
Within the first two minutes of the episode, Weisz's character 'explained' that they had been drunk, he had said he wanted to be dominated, she passed out and the whole thing was just a "huge misunderstanding". She then untied him and confirmed they hadn't had sex.
From there on, the underwhelming finale played out, but in many ways, no matter how engrossing it might have been, I would still have been left with a sour taste in my mouth.
Why establish something so dramatically at odds with where the series started, and an intense raising of the stakes, only to immediately have it hand-waved away within two minutes of the event occurring.
Here, it actively wasn't. Viewers waiting a full eight episodes to find out how that moment would play out, why Weisz was doing what she was doing, what she was planning and how Vladimir would react to it, only for it to be deemed inconsequential, just a silly moment which was easily breezed past.
Alternatively, if it is, then grapple with that fact and deal with the repercussions properly. Take viewers to a darker place, where Weisz's character truly does go off the deep end and becomes dangerous in the process.
Vladimir isn't the first show to do this – as Kelly said ahead of time, it's a trope you can see in plenty of other shows. It also shouldn't be judged solely on one mistake. There are certainly elements and sequences to enjoy here, with a knotty, intriguing exploration of morality and sexual politics at its centre, and an A-grade performance from Weisz.
However, the mistake itself is so brazen, so blatant in its attempt to sell something it never intended to provide, that it does feel fairly unforgivable, and one future series should pay heed to avoid.
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