It’s summer, so we don’t really actually want any new culture. This is one of those strange revelations that I have about this time every year and then manage to forget again almost immediately – so I am surprised upon re-realising it again 12 months later (a similar one is: every October, I will start to feel profound dread, to the point where I’ve set up a recurring calendar entry on the first of the month that just warns: “Dread”).
It is too hot and you can’t find that fan you bought and the Olympics are on and the sun is out, and there’s at least one of those evenings where you decide to walk home from work because it’s so nice out and impromptu plans are always being arranged and you’re having your dinner outside so you can’t watch House of the Dragon because you’re too busy swatting flies away. There’s no point any new culture coming out right now, because who can be bothered to watch it? Just make the film Twister again so we can put that on in the background.
Anyway, I suppose I should start previewing some TV. There’s a new-ish show on ITVX, and it’s interesting in a few different ways that I found very satisfying. I say Slip (8 August) is “new-ish” because it already came out on Roku in the US last year, but British streaming apps have been quietly doing a thing where they acquire and curate interesting TV from other countries lately (see: how everyone was so charmed by Colin from Accounts on iPlayer, or how I am constantly surprised to find a classic film I want to watch is always on Channel 4’s streaming app). If you fuss about on ITVX long enough – ie scroll past all the Love Island content they have and four inexplicable series of McDonald & Dodds – you can find some really good streaming for free.
Slip is part of that new movement of American TV where they get an auteur-like comedy performer to make a highly polished show that they then star in and executive produce, and it very often turns out to be not a comedy at all but about life and mental health (and Dread), so like: Dave, Ramy, Atlanta, Russian Doll, things like that. I am a fairly pretentious person so I am a sucker for all of the above, and Slip is no different. Zoe Lister-Jones, who has been in loads of things but probably most notably was Fawn in New Girl, plays Mae Cannon, who has a cool life (disarmingly nice high-ceilinged apartment, cool husband whom she is nevertheless just ever-so-slightly dissatisfied with, extensive wardrobe, funny best friend) but is itching at the sides of it.
After curating a mystical conceptual art show (if Slip suffers from anything, it suffers from the classic “every single character has a really interesting job” syndrome. What do you mean you’re an art curator?), Mae has sex with a stranger, orgasms, then wakes up in a parallel version of her life, with a different husband and a different apartment and different credit cards in her purse but the same Barbra Streisand novelty coffee mug. She then needs to spend seven episodes orgasming and tiptoeing through various alternative versions of her reality to get back to the one she started with, and she seems determined to do that without ever having a practical or useful conversation with another character about what is happening to her. “You mean, a bit like Everything Everywhere All At Once”? Sure, sort of, yes.
Slip wouldn’t be very good if it leaned too hard on its concept, but in the confusion of waking up in different versions of her own life, Mae keeps having really good, funny conversations with the people around her. I feel like I have now seen every possible version of “best friend who is really charismatic and confident and no-holds-barred about talking about sex”, but Tymika Tafari is one of the better versions in the past few years. The first episode paints an unerringly accurate sketch of the comfortable domesticity of a long-time relationship, and the conversations Mae has with Whitmer Thomas’s Elijah are especially great (seeing a weird kid out at a cinema one night, they gossip about how “I have a hard time guessing children’s ages”).
Listen: I know it’s summer and your brain is too hot and you’ve got some pommel horse to really get into. But if you find yourself up late in the blue glow of the TV with a wet flannel on your head and nowhere new to go, scroll down deep on ITVX and dig out this one. It isn’t long until the Dread comes.
