What Is TV’s Problem With Professors?

Both Netflix’s Vladimir and HBO’s Rooster play into a politically charged caricature of academia.

I have never cared that Grey’s Anatomy or Suits is unrealistic. Yes, I believe that writers should do painstaking research, and that the realistic texture of daily life—whether it’s in an E.R. or a courtroom or a sandwich shop—is something TV creators should value. But it also doesn’t really matter to me if the attorneys on a blue-sky procedural aren’t filing motions correctly. That’s not what I’m there for.

That said, as someone who has lived in and out of higher education for the past 20 years, I have absolutely no tolerance for TV series about the academy. I realize this is rank hypocrisy. In the classroom, I do all I can to disabuse students of an overinvestment in artistic fidelity, whether it’s about the “faithful” adaptation of a cherished novel or the “accurate” depiction of a workplace. I’m currently undergoing an occasionally painful—for me!—semester-long project of convincing a roomful of students that Patrick Somerville’s wildly unfaithful adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s beloved novel Station Eleven might actually be better than the book. And yet, I simply can’t get over my feelings about academia unfaithfully represented on-screen.

So March has been a bad month for me. In the past several weeks, not one but two new comedies set in English departments on college campuses have debuted: Netflix’s Vladimir and HBO’s Rooster. Both series are rife with uncanny-valley moments for professors watching at home. A new professor is hired midsemester, and his class just starts as soon as he arrives, in medias res. College presidents are strangely involved in the intimate day-to-day affairs of the faculty (even agreeing to serve as dissertation advisers to grad students). Broadly, the profession of literature is presented as a kind of mystical endeavor of appreciation rather than a field of study. (Discussion seminars spend way more time on the question of “relatability” than an average English professor would countenance, for instance.) Classroom scenes feel more like episodes of Surrounded—the Jubilee series where a roomful of angry people line up to ask gotcha questions of the guest expert in the middle—than actual course meetings. Vladimir, in general, has a better eye for telling academic detail than Rooster, but neither feels wholly earnest in its depictions.

All the same, as I would happily say to any complaining lawyer or doctor after watching their profession chopped and screwed on TV: Who cares? Why does it matter?

In terms of dramatic value, it doesn’t. Academic TV series, particularly ones about faculty—including The Chair and Lucky Hank, among recent examples—use shorthand to make the petty and byzantine universe of university bureaucracy understandable to civilians. They rely, even if and when they know better, on the viewer’s preconceived notions of academia to fill in gaps you’d otherwise need a David Simon–ian amount of time and patience to fully and faithfully represent on-screen. They do the same thing to the doctors and the lawyers, so why wouldn’t they do it to the professors?

The pickle is that the average gleefully inaccurate legal procedural is not the same as the average gleefully inaccurate academic drama. The difference is not in the execution or research. It’s about what stories writers think they can use these fields to tell. TV writers write about doctors and lawyers because they are deeply interested in those professions. They may mess up the workplace dynamics or invent procedures and precedents, but the drama of diagnosis, the theater of legal argument, these are subjects of rich possibility for teleplay writers. Watching academic TV shows, it’s hard not to suspect that these writers either don’t care about—or actively loathe—their........

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