Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Horror Of Dolores Roach’ On Prime Video, A Take On ‘Sweeney Todd’ Involving A Murderous Masseuse And Empanadas Made Of People

Every time we’ve watched a series based on a podcast, we’ve felt that we were watching a podcast instead of a series. The storytelling is just different between the formats, simply because each is consumed differently. A new series on Prime Video is based on a hit scripted podcast (which was itself based on a play), and it’s formatted as such.

THE HORROR OF DOLORES ROACH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see scenes from the opening night of a Broadway play called Dolores Roach.

The Gist: The star of the play, Flora Frias (Jessica Pimentel) gets lots of praise for playing the real-life killer masseuse, and as she’s about to wipe the fake blood off her face and hands and get out of her costume, she’s confronted by the real Dolores Roach (Justina Machado). It seems that the play got a lot of stuff wrong, and she wants to tell the woman portraying her the real truth. “I’m gonna tell you shit you can never let go. Shit you can never wash off,” she whispers into Flora’s ear. “And then… you’re gonna help me.”

Dolores starts with how she was living in Washington Heights in the early 2000s with her drug-dealing boyfriend Dominic (Anthony Grant). She was on top of the world… until she got busted by the feds, with Dominic nowhere to be found. She ended up going to prison for 16 years because she got run up on charges of possession with intent to distribute and assaulting an officer; she never gave him up to lessen her sentence. When she got released, her cellmate, “The handless masseuse from Philly, my girl Tabitha (Maureen Cassidy),” was heartbroken.

With nowhere else to go, Dolores returns to Washington Heights and goes looking for Dominic. But the whole neighborhood has been gentrified; a young white couple is in their old apartment, the money Dominic hid was gone, and he’s nowhere to be found. One place from her past is still there: “Empanada Fuckin’ Loca!”

When she goes in, she meets Jeremiah (K. Todd Freeman), who is making a delivery, and an indifferent cashier named Nellie (Kita Updike). The empanadas have weird fillings, and her favorite one is guava and cheese. When she’s told they can’t break a fifty for an empanada, she’s about to walk out when the owner, Luis Batista (Alejandro Hernandez), recognizes her and calls her the “VIP.” When he was a teenager, and his late father was in charge, he used to deliver empanadas to Dolores’ apartment and she’d tip him with joints. He still harbors a crush on her.

He offers her a free place to stay in the apartment under the empanada shop, and marvels at her massage skills, which she learned from Tabatha. She falls asleep in the bed where Luis’ dad slept and died peacefully. “Of course, I had no idea how many more people would go on to die in that room… maybe not so peacefully,” she says to Flora.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Horror Of Dolores Roach is based on the 2018-19 scripted podcast of the same name, which started Daphne Rubin-Vega (an executive producer of the TV series). Of course, the story is a modern take on Sweeney Todd. As far as the style and tone of the series, it’s similar to Swarm, which uses ominous music and light and shadow to communicate foreboding.

Our Take: Aaron Mark, who wrote the podcast, is the co-showrunner along with Dara Resnik; Jason Blum and Blumhouse along with Gloria Calderón Kellett’s GloNation are also executive producers. In a lot of ways, it feels like a staged podcast made into video form. The episodes are short, about 30 minutes each, and the story is told completely in flashback, with Dolores telling her story to the actress playing her on stage.

There’s lots to like about the story, including the modern take on Sweeney Todd, but the format doesn’t do the show any favors. You’re not listening to these episodes in the car or while doing laundry like you might have done with the podcast, you’re sitting and paying attention to the acting, the visuals, and everything else. And given how you don’t even get the entire gist of the story until the end of the third episode, you start to feel a little frustrated by the end of the second episode, where Marc Maron pops up as Luis’ new landlord Gideon Pearlman and is the first person getting a massage on Dolores’ new massage table (you can imply the rest from there).

If just feels like, for TV, we had to get to the meat of the story (pun intended) much faster. Thank goodness for Justina Machado, who is a tour de force here. We see the version of Dolores that has murdered and gotten arrested, and Machado’s manner is so different from the version of Dolores that is just out of prison and unsure of where she’s going to live, much less what she’s going to do with her life. We see enough flashes of her rage as she navigates the gentrified Washington Heights to buy what might make her kill, even though the sequence that shows her first kill isn’t as convincing as it should be.

Hernandez is also good as the off-kilter Luis, as Updike as the somewhat indifferent Nellie. Guest shots from the likes of Judy Reyes and Cyndi Lauper also are fun to watch. All of this helps us forget about the awkward format, especially as the story really gets going. We just wish it got going faster.

Sex and Skin: None in the first three episodes.

Parting Shot: Dolores is interrupted as she tells her story to Flora. She then goes to lock the dressing room door, and says to Flora, “You’re such a good listener.”

Sleeper Star: We liked Jean Yoon as Joy, who runs a laundromat a few doors from the empanada place, mainly because she’s as loopy as Luis and the rest of the people in Dolores’ orbit.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Hope I didn’t make you nervous,” Dolores says to the couple in her old apartment as she leaves. That’s certainly a foreshadowing moment, isn’t it?

Our Call: STREAM IT, mostly for Machado’s performance. The format of The Horror Of Dolores Roach makes it tough to get into the story, but her performance kept us watching despite our frustrations with the storytelling.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.