I’m going to start with a fairly controversial statement: personally, I think the abundance of streaming platforms formed over the past decade has permanently changed TV. I know, I know. I am the only person who has ever thought this, and ever will. But of the many ways the various clunkily named, plus-symbol affixed platforms have altered how we consume television – big-name A-listers in limited high-budget series; the way we now binge eight hours of content in one day just to have a zeitgeisty opinion about them; the strange re-popularisation of corny Christmas films – one that has flown relatively under the radar is the concept of “ambient television”.
What is ambient television? Well, primarily, it’s people who can’t fall asleep unless the American version of The Office is playing in the background. That’s what Netflix first figured out, then started to weaponise: a lot of streaming platform television is now, I am convinced, designed to be half-watched, puttered around to. You can make dinner and miss five or six scenes but figure out the gist anyway. The platform autoplays from one episode to the next and you didn’t notice because you took a toilet break without pausing and only twigged when you said, out loud, “this is a long episode”. You can paint your nails to it, or go on your phone to it, or flutter into a nap. We are living through a peak time in history for pausing episodes halfway through because it doesn’t really matter, and this is because streaming platforms have started methodically making half-TV, to be half-paid attention to.
This is a damning way to bring in The Horror of Dolores Roach (from Friday 7 July, Prime Video), which I very much enjoyed, but also could feasibly have watched from halfway across my living room, while trying to put a cabinet together, or perhaps while on hold to my bank. The titular Dolores Roach, played with aplomb by Justina Machado, just got out of prison after doing a 16-year bit without snitching. When she gets back to her beloved Washington Heights, the neighbourhood has changed – spooky with New York gentrification – and the lover she lost a decade-and-a-half to protecting is nowhere to be seen. Then – and I promise you this made a lot more sense when I was watching it – she starts a massage parlour in an empanada shop and starts killing people and putting them in the empanadas. Again: it makes more sense if you see it.
What’s great about The Horror of Dolores Roach, though, is that it’s very knowingly fun. Tonally, they got it just right – Machado isn’t chewing the scenery, but she’s had a few nibbles at some of the walls. Alejandro Hernandez’s sweetly psychotic empanada boy is a perfect foil, and at times it has the touch and feel of Poker Face, one of my TV highlights of the year so far. There’s some great, well-observed material about the constantly changing shift of New York, but without hitting those old “they got coffee shops with hipsters in them!” notes, and there’s a play-within-the-show that lovingly lampoons the city’s theatre culture. An upstairs neighbour is, obviously, making an ambient audio project where he interviews the old stalwarts of the city, because that’s what every fifth person in New York is duty-bound to do. You get to see Marc Maron die. It really is a lot of fun.
The Horror … is based on an audio series from 2018, written by Aaron Mark (who has a nice Off Broadway background, which helps) and that adds a certain texture to what’s going on here, too – the half-narrated first episode is a pacy, head-spinning 26 minutes that doesn’t hit a single one of the tropes you get with a bad pilot episode. There’s a pleasing ghoulishness to it – there are various murders, every one feeling inventive and silly rather than gore for gore’s sake – and the whole thing quietly acts as a satirical swipe at current murder podcast culture, too. But it is a little strange that they’ve finally invented a TV series you don’t have to actually look at to watch. Line up a big basket of laundry that needs folding, or an online grocery shop you’ve been meaning to do, and tuck in. You’ll come to in a daze after four hours, someone will have balled all your socks together, and Prime will be asking if you want to watch an 88-minute Christmas film. Without knowing, you will click: yes.
• This article was amended on 5 July 2023. An earlier version referred incorrectly in the text and headline to enchiladas, rather than empanadas.
