Happy Friday! Spring is almost here, which means soon enough you’ll be outside playing in your Quidditch league and going to Montreal Expos games. But until then, while there is still a tingle of winter in the air, there is stuff to watch at home. It’s all TV in today’s letter, but you can read my thoughts about the week’s big theatrical release here. 

Vladimir (Netflix), Rooster (HBO, March 8)

Have you ever seen the Josh Radnor-written, directed, and starring movie Liberal Arts? It’s about Josh Radnor if he was a college admissions counselor returning to his old university campus and everyone’s obsessed with him. It’s a really embarrassing movie that makes Garden State look like a great act of humility, but it does scratch one particular itch: it is kind of nice to revisit college, isn’t it? Plenty of shows do it from a student perspective: The Sex Lives of College Girls, Overcompensating, the late great Greek. And there, of course, have been some from the professors’ point of view, like the Sandra Oh series The Chair. 

But have two college shows ever come out in the same week before? I don’t think so. But that is what’s happening with HBO’s Rooster and Netflix’s Vladimir, two series about campus life that take very different tacks as they sensationalize and send up academia. It makes sense that they both exist, as we are ever obsessed with the new pieties and pitfalls and social mores of university life, which has turned into a hellscape of woke persecutions of heterodox thought, a great regulating of the marketplace of ideas that only a few brave conservative traditionalists are bravely crusading against. Or whatever the op-ed page narrative is. The point is, everyone’s talking about college these days, so here are these shows to satisfy some of that hunger for uni content. But which one should you watch?