Low-stakes academic adultery, Atlanta plays St. Louis and a red-herring stew

It’s a wonder the English professor known only as M (Rachel Weisz) gets any work done. In Netflix’s Vladimir, she spends most of her hours fantasizing about her newest faculty colleague. You guessed it: He’s a fellow novelist named Vladimir (a thicker, bearded and squinty-eyed Leo Woodall, swiftly aging out of his roguish White Lotus/One Day prime). On all conceivable surfaces and in every cranny of their leafy college, M imagines herself and Vladimir shucking their academic duds and going at it. Against a bookcase. In the library stacks. On the desktop — possibly dislodging the last novel she published before suffering writer’s block.

It doesn’t matter that she and Vladimir are both married. That’s almost the point. M is long wed to fellow prof John (John Slattery, doing the silver-fox, John Slattery thing). He has a long history of sleeping with students, but the couple has “an understanding.” That extends to M’s long-ago affair with the department chair David (Veep VIP Matt Walsh). Vlad himself is married to fellow academic Cynthia (Jessica Henwick), a poet trailing a poetic history of depression.  

Hot for the (younger) teacher, M addresses the camera (the first of many times, giving the show a whiff of Fleabag), confessing, “It has recently come to my attention that I may never again have power over another human being.” The self-mocking, academic precision of the line sums up the emotional tone of Vladimir and of M herself. She sets out to prove that she still has some attention-getting bad girl juju, even if Vladimir turns out to be her last conquest.

Adapted from Julia May Jonas’ novel by veteran producer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (American Splendor, Fleishman Is in Trouble), the eight-episode show is a comedy of manners that wants to perch atop a romantic volcano. But it’s a little too civilized for its own good, even as the notion of “civilized” is gently skewered. As much as mid-life lust, the focus is on post-#MeToo sexual mores and the safe space- and trigger-sensitive students of modern universities. Since M and John’s marriage of equals never really risks a genuine rupture, the stakes are low.

The show is best when M dissects her own psychology. To assuage her guilty fantasies about seducing Vladimir, she love-bombs his wife Cynthia with gifts and invitations to dinner, trying to win over the shy young colleague (though, as M sniffily reminds us, Cynthia is an adjunct, not a full professor). There’s also a through line about the looming probationary hearing to address John’s serial affairs with students. As his spouse, M is publicly expected to take a public stand of some kind — either to defend her husband or support the students who lodged complaints.

It’s all literate and watchable, even if there’s never any doubt that M, as played by the still-stunning Weisz, could easily mow down any guy on campus she desired. She’s no Emma Bovary, risking everything for a worthless man. The only real obstacles M faces are the ones she creates for herself. The show is a tale of female empowerment, featuring a female lead already empowered. Her only real challenge is that writer’s block … and you can probably guess what happens to that by the end of this you-go-girl dramedy, with footnotes.

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The theme of middle-aged professionals spinning out of control continues with Rooster. Considering their past hits, including Ted Lasso, Shrinking and Scrubs (original and current reboot), I’d love to say the team of Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses has cooked up another winner. Yeah, not quite, at least based on the shows that have aired so far. (The 10-episode comedy continues every Sunday through May 10.)

Steve Carell plays Greg Russo, a popular author in the mold of Carl Hiaasen. His books are the kind you’re supposed to read on the beach, he says: “Characters that you like have sex; the ones that you don’t get shot in the face.” Given the mass-market nature of his work, he seems an unlikely guest speaker at cozy Ludlow University. True to form, after he reads a passage from one of his novels, a student asks, “Why do you hate women?”

Greg is there to support his daughter Katie (Charly Clive), a Ludlow professor. Her husband Archie (chisel-jawed Phil Dunster from Ted Lasso), a Russian lit scholar, has blown up their marriage via an affair with (you guessed it) a student. As in the Apple TV+ show Shrinking, everyone here is smart, self-aware and able to talk about their feelings and foibles in ways that start to feel off-puttingly shiny and scripted before you can decide if you care about any of them.

The cast includes Scrubs veteran John C. McGinley as the university’s president, addicted to his sauna and cold plunge and walking around campus wet and shirtless. Then there’s Atlanta’s own Danielle Deadwyler in the difficult role, so far, of poetry professor Dylan.

What makes the role difficult is that Rooster seems to be positioning her as Greg’s romantic interest. In the opening episode, she even propositions him. Deadwyler is such a skilled, magnetic actor that she can convince me of almost anything. Almost. Maybe the show will prove me wrong, but a pairing of her sparky Dylan and Carell’s schlubby Greg seems like a match made not in heaven but in a writers’ room full of people trying too hard. Or not hard enough.

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In DTF St. Louis, that city’s weatherman, Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), introduces his new colleague, flabby ASL signer Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), to the dating app that gives the show its title. (Don’t know what DTF means? Look it up.)

They’re both married men. Clark’s wife is Eimy (the underused Wynn Everett, who brought zest to the blah Chad Powers). Floyd’s is Carol (Linda Cardellini), a flirty mom with a son from a previous marriage, a glum boy named Richard (Arlan Ruf), whose main hobby is hurling rocks against the sides of people’s houses. (That’s one of the show’s many oddball details that seems right, not just willfully “colorful.”)

Because it happens right away, it’s no spoiler to say that Clark and Carol launch an affair, Floyd winds up dead and DTF sends mismatched detectives to solve the case: Old-school veteran Homer (the great Richard Jenkins) and young, savvy Plumb (Joy Sunday, from Wednesday).

Shot in Atlanta, the show was created by Steve Conrad, known for two quirky series’ I haven’t seen, Patriot and Perpetual Grace LTD. The murder mystery setup is standard, even overly familiar, but Conrad approaches everything from an oddball angle. Like that rock-throwing kid, some of it works; some doesn’t.

Shifting between comic and sinister, Bateman is more comfortable than he was straining to be a feckless badass in Netflix’s Black Rabbit. Harbour is so lovable as the hapless, bighearted Floyd, it may help him recover from the blowback he got from his ex-wife Lily Allen’s scorched-earth breakup album, West End Girl.

Not quite a comedy, not quite a noir, deadpan one moment and earnest the next, DTF St. Louis drifts among genres scene by scene. Does it work? Just a few episodes in, I’m not sure yet, because I’m not sure what “it” really is. Something about it keeps drawing me back. Besides, it’s always fun spotting obvious Atlanta locales posing as St. Louis. (Shout out to Piedmont Park and the old Buckhead Diner, setting for a memorably uncomfortable blind date for poor, doomed Floyd.) The show’s seven episodes continue weekly through April 12.

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Patricia Cornwell started publishing her Kay Scarpetta series, about a crime-solving female medical examiner, in 1990. Almost four decades and 29 books later, a long-attempted show arrives, starring Nicole Kidman and Rosy McEwen as both present-day and 1998 versions of the main character. We also get Bobby Cannavale and his real-life son Jake as the two versions of Kay’s detective pal Pete Marino, and Simon Baker and Hunter Parrish as both incarnations of FBI agent, suitor and eventual husband of Kay, Benton Wesley. And just wait until you meet the two versions of Kay’s sister Dorothy, a cleavage-slinging, tipsy, best-selling kids’ author … but you’ll only remember Jamie Lee Curtis, chewing the scenery as the older version.

Anyhoo, the dual structure of the eight-episode show means we meet these characters at the promising starts of their careers in ’98, while the present timeline shows us, in several cases, what looks like the messy disintegration of those same relationships.

With all that going on, you’d expect the show to be structured tight as clockwork. Instead, Scarpetta spends loads of time with digressions that keep steering us away from the central murder mystery. Or mysteries, as it turns out. She may be, like Kidman, an Oscar winner, but the show gives Curtis much too much time as Dorothy and Pete crash temporarily with Kay and Wesley. Meanwhile, Dorothy’s daughter Lucy, a brilliant computer hacker and former FBI agent (natch) lives like a hermit in a cottage on the property, spending her days talking to her dead wife Janet (Janet Montgomery) in the form of a sentient AI program.

It’s a lot, and show creator Elizabeth Sarnoff doesn’t seem to know how to make it all fit together. Neither do the actors. For the record, the story centers on a serial killer Kay unmasked in 1998, only now, in 2026, bodies with the same murderer’s signature are turning up, making her wonder if she nailed the wrong man. Oh, there’s also, like the AI character, an apparent attempt to make the old book series seem au courant, a subplot about a biotech company 3D-printing of human organs.

The last episode careens so wildly out of control, it’s as if everyone — from cast to crew — locked into panic mode, trying to make sense of the eight-episode stew of red-herring plotlines and interpersonal soap opera. Only Curtis seems to be having a good time, and that’s because she’s acting in an entirely different show — a comedy that seems a lot more fun than what the long-gestating show turned out to be.

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous columns here.