The Horror of Dolores Roach: 5 Things to Know About Prime Video’s Killer Comedy Series Starring Justina Machado

Claire Franken
·5 min read
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How many people does it take to make an empanada? Normally just one, but if you’re Dolores Roach, you’ll need a few extra bodies for the filling.

The Horror of Dolores Roach, which debuts all eight episodes on Friday, July 7, follows Dolores (One Day at a Time‘s Justina Machado) as she acclimates to life after serving a 16-year prison sentence for selling weed. After so much time away, she comes to find that her old neighborhood has completely changed, forcing her to leave her old life behind with no clear idea for how to build a new one.

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After reuniting with her old friend Luis (New Amsterdam’s Alejandro Hernandez), Dolores devises a plan to turn her talent for massaging into a real business. Luis allows Dolores to work as a masseuse in the basement of his empanada shop, but just when things get off the ground a pesky landlord and a few neighborhood drug dealers threaten to destroy her chance at earning a living. In an act of desperation to take control of her own life, Dolores accidentally becomes a serial killer. (Oops!) How does she escape consequence? Luis butchers the bodies and serves them in empanadas. To her own horror, Dolores gets stuck in the throes of a cannibalism scheme that completely spirals out of control.

“It’s Dolores going: ‘Am I in a horror movie? What the hell is going on here?’ Her sort of commentary on the tone of her life gives us permission to believe that this is really happening,” creator and executive producer Aaron Mark tells TVLine.

But wait, murder, cannibalism, empanadas and weed — what the hell is happening in this series? We’ve got you covered. Below are a few key things to know ahead of the premiere so that you can work up an appetite for all the flesh-filled empanadas to come.

THE CAST | In addition to Machado and Hernandez, the main cast includes Kita Updike (The Misandrists), K. Todd Freeman (A Series of Unfortunate Events) with appearances by Marc Maron (GLOW), Jean Yoon (Kim’s Convenience), Judy Reyes (Scrubs), Jeffrey Self (Search Party) and Jessica Pimentel (Orange Is the New Black).

HOW IT ALL BEGAN | The story began as Empanada Loca, a 2015 off-Broadway play starring In the Heights’ Daphne Rubin-Vega, inspired by Mark’s own experiences living in New York City’s Washington Heights as gentrification altered his community. But he always knew that Dolores “can’t be contained to 90 minutes” and that she is “unkillable.” So he pitched the TV version of the story in early 2016, but “people thought I was out of my mind and I was practically laughed out of pitches.” While it wasn’t the moment for Dolores’ on-screen debut, Mark had all the material for a serialized version of the story. He ultimately adapted the project as a scripted podcast for Gimlet Media in 2018. “The irony is, we made the podcast really based on material I had created for a TV pitch of the play.”

A FRESH TAKE ON AN OLD LEGEND | “I would sit at these coffee shops and diners for hours and hours and hours, and one by on they would all vanish,” Mark says about the story’s origins. “I felt like I was watching a neighborhood cannibalize itself. That to me was, ‘Oh my god, it’s a cannibalism story set in this neighborhood.’ I was thinking about Sweeney Todd set in Washington Heights. And I kept thinking, well, why can’t Daphne Rubin-Vega play Sweeney Todd?”

A RELATABLE KILLER | Dolores is a murderer, yes, but she isn’t some cartoonish terror that lurks in the shadows at night. “She’s somebody who an audience might think is not like them due to things that she goes through early in the season and an audience might think: Oh, I’d never behave the way that she behaves,” Mark says. “But hopefully, what the series does is walk you, dear viewer, through — step by step — how she’s you, she’s me. She’s any of us backed into a corner. We may behave exactly the same way.” Machado herself connected with Dolores’ complexity as both human and monster. “She’s not out there trying to kill people, it just kind of happens,” she says. “That’s why people kind of root for her because it’s not like she’s out there scheming that things happen.”

SO META! | The show addresses its own origins while also seeming to poke fun at the entire true-crime genre. Dolores is our narrator throughout the series, offering us her own explanation for the events that have, years earlier, turned her into a notorious killer and the subject of a dramatized podcast and play. “We went full meta,” Mark says. “In the writers’ room, we were really fascinated by the idea of this character who just wants to be under the radar. She wants to be left alone, she doesn’t want to be seen. She doesn’t want to make a splash. Then, taking that character and making her world famous.” But she doesn’t want all the notoriety. She just wants to set the record straight. “She’s reclaiming [her story] and she’s changing it,” Machado says. “Dolores doesn’t do anything but move forward. It’s like she’s indestructible. If there was a nuclear war, the roaches would still be walking around. That’s Dolores Roach.”

Are you planning to watch The Horror of Dolores Roach? Let us know in the comments!

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