Two New Comedies Try to Make Sex on Campus Funny Again

Two new TV comedies, Netflix's 'Vladimir' and HBO's 'Rooster' meet the post-post-#MeToo moment with surprising levity—but still feel a bit dated. 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?”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.Rachel Weisz in Vladimir Shane Mahood—NetflixIf 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?AdvertisementThese 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.Sandra Oh as Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim and Nana Mensah as Dr. Yasmin McKay in The Chair Eliza Morse—NetflixAdvertisementVladimir 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.AdvertisementRooster 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).Danielle Deadwyler and Steve Carell in Rooster Katrina Marcinowski—HBOAdvertisementLawrence 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. Ka