At some point in our lives, everyone has succumbed to thinking about how their lives would be different if they had made one small change: marry a different person, take a different job, maybe question their sexuality a little. But as much as we'd like to imagine that things could be better, that we'd be happier with something new and shiny instead of the love-worn things we have, Zoe Lister-Jones seeks to challenge that idea with her new series, Slip, about what happens when a person has to travel infinite universes to find their way home.
Written, directed and starring Lister-Jones, Slip follows Mae Cannon, an assistant museum curator bored with the life she leads, one of perfect stability if mundane with her husband, Elijiah (Whitmer Thomas). Though both live comfortably, it's easy to see that neither is truly happy, as they've fallen into patterns too sad to escape, causing Mae to reconsider what she wants out of her life and whether marital stability is really what she wants. . of life.
Creator: Zoe Lister-Jones
Stars: Jess Salgueiro, Dylan Taylor, Chris Bacchus
She quickly gets her answer when she "slips" and sleeps with a stranger at her local bar (Amar Chadha-Patel), only to wake up to find herself married to him, seemingly having slipped (ha) through the cracks of the universe and into one. different. It's an unfortunate discovery, even though she's gone from living a small, boring life to a huge life filled with fame and fortune, and immediate panic seizes Mae. She quickly realizes that she no longer knows who she is without the normality that she once had. she knew.
Thus begins Mae's journey to find her way back to where she belongs, traveling through existence after existence, spouse after spouse, each one more chaotic than the last. Combined with drugs, alcohol, and the kind of mayhem she could never have imagined for herself with Elijiah, Mae's journey through endless possibilities is spike after spike of dry humor, a wild adventure in the vein of Everything Everywhere All at Once. as her sense of self-awareness warps, each spouse (and a competing version of herself) making her question who she is and why she was dissatisfied with her life in the first place.
While this sounds like the making of the next Matrix movie, or perhaps a cheap entry into the MCU via rom-coms, Slip is anything but your average story. Perhaps it's fitting that the series lands with The Roku Channel, whose lively offering Weird: The Al Yankovic Story reflects the same kind of wacky, experimental creativity. Slip pushes the envelope to bursting with his examination of what it really means to love someone, including yourself.
Lister-Jones' voice is singular and unique, creating something that goes beyond its vaguely sci-fi concept, and certainly stands apart from the myriad of stories about infinite worlds we've received in recent years. Slip cares not about the multiverse, no, but about the people who inhabit it, and how our interactions with each other refract and come together, inspecting the things we do out of love and despair and the messy results that come with it. It's about building believable and memorable characters, mostly spouses, out of miniscule interactions, from shitty stockbrokers to lesbian bar owners to famous musicians, the last of whom I still find the best of them all. (Am I saying this partly because I loved Chadha-Patel in Willow? Maybe, but I'd still like to see him lead his own rom-com one day.)
Thus Slip's world, despite never leaving New York City, feels lush and expansive, a place where one choice, one misstep could change your entire life. It walks on the razor's edge of comedy, nearing the plunge into cringe humor that I normally find deplorable, but never quite taking the full plunge, perhaps due to Lister-Jones' commitment to Mae's emotional journey as much as writer as actress Mae is morbidly hilarious, a woman who assumes she's got her life in order until she doesn't, uttering lines like "I think my c**sy's a wormhole" with a face so straight I had a hard time not doubling down like a cheap garden chair His pain and confusion reverberate across the screen like a pound of bricks in the chest, but Slip never leaves you with those feelings for more than a moment, in the same way that Mae's life and journey also move at a breakneck pace.
But even beyond the creative conceit and the characters that kept me coming back for more (half-hours each, the episodes are compulsively compulsive), there's something deeper about Slip, a consciousness so utterly possessed by Lister-Jones that it feels Kinda revolutionary, the kind of secret thing communicated.
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