The opening scenes – perhaps even the entire first episode – of the new seven-part comedy drama Slip (created, written, produced by and starring Zoe Lister-Jones) do not augur well. We meet Mae (Lister-Jones), a New York art curator in her late 30s, as she delivers a monologue about her discontents. Life is like “a super-banal dream”, like witnessing a version of your life, like merely watching and taking notes. She longs for more. It turns out that she is disgorging this depressed stream of consciousness to a 24-year-old barista (Jess Salgueiro), in response to a polite inquiry about her day. Mae and her uncharismatic husband of 13 years, Elijah (Whitmer Thomas), are in a rut – though barely rutting. Perhaps because “he dresses like if Kurt Cobain was a lesbian”. Or perhaps because, as Mae tells her best friend, Gina (Tymika Tafari), who is single and deeply envies Mae’s stability and escape from the Manhattan dating scene: “After a certain amount of time, you’re just single together.”
Predictably, then, Mae has a one-night stand, with Eric, a famous musician (played by Amar Chadha-Patel, most recently seen as the hot doctor in The Decameron). Less predictably, Mae’s resulting orgasm transports her into another dimension, in which she is married to Eric instead of Elijah and living a life of partying, drugs and negotiation of Eric’s infidelities. Is this, then, the answer to her woes? No, of course not.
