In one of those weird cases of synchronicity oddly common in pop culture, two different platforms debuted prestige comedies set on college campuses in early March. In Netflix’s Vladimir, Rachel Weisz and John Slattery play a married couple who teach in the same liberal-arts school’s literature department, where they struggle with the evolving sexual politics of a modern university. And in HBO’s Rooster, Steve Carell portrays a popular detective novelist who agrees to be a writer-in-residence at a college in order to keep a close eye on his emotionally frazzled daughter who’s a professor there.
Both shows have their merits. Vladimir, adapted by writer-producer Julia May Jonas from her own novel, has an involving plot—about a scandal that threatens to destroy the main characters’ careers and marriage—and a refreshing frankness about the sexual desires of the middle-aged. Rooster was co-created by Scrubs and Shrinking‘s Bill Lawrence (with his frequent collaborator Matt Tarses), and as with nearly all of his work, there’s a zippiness and a sweetness to the series that makes it very easy to watch.
But does either show have anything fresh or insightful to say about college life in 2026? Goodness no. Did we expect them to? Television has long been terrible at depicting what happens in schools—and in college in particular. Movies aren’t much better.
There are exceptions, of course. Back in the olden days (that is, the 1970s), The Paper Chase offered a knowing and sensitive depiction of law school. There are scattered other examples. But for the most part, when it comes to the lives of college students and professors—and administrators, groundskeepers, alumni societies, what-have-you—our TV shows fall short. Take it from someone who isn’t an expert per se, but who is married to one. My wife has been teaching at a mid-sized state university for more than 25 years.
Classically, there have been two models for a campus comedy or drama. If the story’s about the kids, it’s mainly about their social life: pledging, partying, playing sports, joining clubs, screwing around. Stories about professors, on the other hand, all seem to be channeling the literary novels and New Yorker short stories of the late 20th century. They deal with mid-life crises: affairs, alcoholism, parenthood, disappointment.
Vladimir and Rooster are very much in that solid, stolid literary mode. Their dominant textures are brick, wood paneling, and tweed. Rooster especially has a John Updike/Philip Roth feel, with a touch of autumnal New England chill. The primary difference between these two shows and those old books is they’re set in the present day—aggressively so. They have Things To Say about These Kids Today.
Rooster hits those notes early. In the opening scene, Carell’s character Greg Russo is treated rudely by his campus guide, a kid who doesn’t understand his jokes and who puts in earbuds in to avoid conversation. Later, after a reading from one of his pulpy, macho crime novels, a young woman savages the sexist stereotypes in Greg’s work to the loud approval of most of her classmates—with the exception of a small pocket of bros, who think Greg’s swaggering detective hero Rooster is awesome. Lawrence and Tarses are humanists, for the most part, always looking for the good in different types of people. But even though their take on modern college students isn’t savage, it does mock them, glibly.
It’s worth noting that Vladimir creator Jonas has earned any “Kingsley Amis plus annoyingly woke teens” affectations. She’s an actual novelist, for one. Plus, she has classroom experience. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she talked about how her book was inspired in part by her irritation with her students at Skidmore and NYU, who would take a default defensive stance against the readings she assigned. “I encountered a form of criticism that was like, ‘This is misogynist, this is racist, this is heteronormative,’” she said. There’s a scene like that in Vladimir, where Weisz’s character—known only as “M”—pushes back against students complaining about the misogyny in Rebecca by urging them to find a connection to its more universal themes.
That’s actually one of Vladimir’s better moments, at least when it comes to the show’s version of what college classes are like. The scene feels real. It’s the kind of classroom exchange that could happen today and likely does.
But it still speaks to the core problem with a lot of contemporary stories of campus life: They don’t take the students’ concerns seriously. The kids are treated as either a joke or a complication. There are plenty of other Vladimir scenes where M and her colleagues gripe about how their students are no fun. They don’t have sex anymore because they’re “too busy calling their moms.” They blow off homework and then blame their lateness on mental-health struggles. (One young man explains that his “executive function” has been weak ever since he came out as a “gynosexual”…attracted to women even if they have penises.) This perspective is echoed in Rooster, where a dean chuckles with his colleagues while saying that a student who claims to have ADHD is probably just lazy.
You could argue that these scenes are meant to criticize the exhausted, jaded professors more than their students. That’s not a stretch, except for maybe when it comes to the gynosexual. My wife certainly has colleagues who groan about the younger generation. But she also has colleagues who build a rapport with their classes by seeing their students as complicated, well-meaning human beings who are dealing with pressures their elders never experienced. It hasn’t been easy for today’s teens and twentysomethings, growing up immersed in social media—and during the twin traumas of the pandemic and rising authoritarianism.
There have been a handful of shows that have tried to capture the intensity and combativeness of everyday life for recent college students. Both Grown-ish and Dear White People wove politics into the usual social-life-focused college-kid stories. But what’s missing from even the better campus comedies and dramas is some keen observation about what classes are actually like, what administration is like, and what goes on with all of the support systems that keep a university running.
Whenever we see college classes (or high-school ones, for that matter), we usually either see the first five minutes, with the instructors standing in front of a blackboard/whiteboard and introducing the day’s subject, or the final five minutes, where they sum up the lecture with something pithy before dismissing the class and shouting out a reminder of the next assignment. We don’t see a lot of small seminars, or students talking through the readings among themselves while the professor simply listens. (To be fair, the second episode of Rooster does feature a scene in a smaller, seminar-like classroom. But it cuts away as soon as the actual class starts.)
We also don’t see a lot of professors (or their TAs) grading, or logging those grades, or using any of the various educational software platforms. Technology in general is largely absent from the TV and movie classroom, unless a student is surreptitiously glancing at a cell phone or a class is indifferently taking notes on their laptops. Parents of high-school students on TV shows still ask, “Do you have any homework?” I never hear them say, “I checked Schoology—did you finish your APUSH assignment?” Yet those kinds of tools have been available since my kids were in grade school. (They’re both in their twenties now.)
Vladimir, again, does seem better informed about college life than Rooster. The show has a running subplot about how M’s messy personal life is getting in the way of writing a recommendation letter for her star student. That’s a relatable stressor. The cast and crew also do a good job of using the heavily landscaped campus space, with its mix of the natural and artificial. There’s a memorable shot in one episode of M rushing to her office by clumsily walking up the kind of picturesque terraced hill that is meant to be sat upon, not traversed. That kind of campus-specific visual comedy is a rare treat.
I should reiterate that both Vladimir and Rooster are mainly telling stories about relationships with academia as a backdrop. Rooster is about Greg’s anxieties as a father and an author. His journey into teaching college classes mainly serves as a way to add more variety and incident to each episode. There’s nothing wrong with that. Rooster is also very funny, which covers for a lot of its sins.
Still, it sure would be great to see a campus-set TV series with the kind of commitment to realism that we see in something like The Pitt or The Wire or The Bear. Universities offer plenty of rich drama that isn’t about love affairs or angry political activists. (My wife is on a committee that hears parking-fine appeals. You want to talk about drama!)
I’d even go so far as to say that it’s important for our popular culture to reflect college life with the same kind of detail and nuance that we get from an Emmy-winning hospital series. Much of our public discourse about education is rooted on false presumptions of what students, teachers, and classes are really like. Our representatives in Congress and state houses are making decisions about colleges based on the idea that university life is mainly about professors delivering pronouncements from on high and then giving bad grades to students who don’t agree. (It’s also about sex—and there is sex in these shows.)
But that’s not what college is. College is all-nighters, free cultural events, midnight pizzas, job fairs, filing a request to switch dorms, padding out a semester schedule with a soft elective that turns out to be unexpectedly challenging, rethinking your major, connecting with a professor who becomes a mentor, trying to get your aging laptop to stay connected to the wifi, sitting through long explanations about the department’s new AI policy, and dozens of other common experiences that rarely make it to the screen.
Oh, and conversations. That’s what’s missing the most. Stories set on campuses tend to feature a lot of people talking at each other and not enough folks talking with one another. That seems to be the image some legislators have in mind when they vote to cut funding for colleges: this fictionalized version of universities, where there’s a culture of indoctrination, not incubation. And as good storytellers should know, the best way to counter any prevailing narrative is to come up with something that rings truer.
Noel Murray is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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