Attend the tale of Delores Roach. In an unabashed riff on the class story of Sweeney Todd (unabashed in the sense that the series has a character compare the story to that of the Stephen Sondheim musical late in the first season), The Horror of Delores Roach isn’t all that original. However, in its leading lady Justina Machado, the series has enough juice to make it wholly watchable even when you can guess the various Sweeney-inspired twists and turns before they happen.
Like the Demon Barber of Fleet Street before her, Delores Roach has just been released from a long prison stint – 16 years – although she was locked up after taking the fall for her drug dealer boyfriend rather than sent to prison on trumped up charges by an angry and jealous judge. Returning to Washington Heights after so long away, Delores is shocked at the changes to her old neighborhood (gentrification) and struggles to find a landing place now that everyone and everything is so different. Enter Luis (Alejandro Hernandez), the owner of the local empanada shop (our Mrs. Lovett), who was just a teenager the last time Delores saw him but who is still harboring a heck of a crush on her, all these years later. He offers her a room to stay in under the shop and then offers to let her open a massage parlor (a real one – this isn’t some front for a prostitution ring) so she can bring in cash. If you know the Sweeney Todd story, you can guess where this is going: massage customers going missing, the empanadas getting a special new recipe. This isn’t a clean one to one adaptation, so there are a couple new bits that spice things up, but you get the basic plot.
Now, there’s a reason Sweeney Todd the musical remains one of the most popular of Sondheim’s list of shows – in fact it’s currently doing bang-up business on Broadway in a new revival. Blood, revenge, murder, cannibalism. It appeals to the baser elements that exist within us all and allows us to explore that darkness while still keeping it at arm’s length thanks to the somewhat silly elements within the story (like, in our modern times, people missing would be way more noticeable and easy to track than in the past – and while the series does mention that, it’s still a moment of suspended disbelief). And Delores Roach works for a lot of the same reasons. There’s a darkness, a violence, and very few of the characters – including many of the victims – are particularly good. We aren’t necessarily rooting for Delores and Luis either – theirs is an uneasy partnership with a lot of trauma from both their pasts constantly threatening to overwhelm them both. But the show is also darkly funny – bitingly funny more often than not – and you can’t help but keep watching to try and see if Delores and Luis can keep getting away with what they’re doing.
But the key to making the show work as well as it does is Machado and Hernandez. The actors have great chemistry and an ease between them while they share the screen (and seeing as Delores and Luis are intertwined throughout the season, they share the screen quite a bit). Hernandez handles a lot of the comedic heavy lifting in the early episodes, as Luis is presented as a stoned underachiever, but he manages to make the slow evolution of the character hit as Luis emerges into someone much more than we were led to believe he could become. And then there’s Machado. Hollywood needs to give her as many leading roles as possible. Very few actors could take a complex character like Delores – someone whose narration we need to trust, but whose actions scream not to trust her – and turn her into the interesting ball of conflicting characteristics that Machado manages to do. She ensures that we see Delores sweat when we need to – killing folks in secret and then knowing they’re being baked into empanadas isn’t exactly something that gets the blood pressure to drop – but also ensures that we know Delores is capable of weathering the storm if needed. This isn’t a character who will fall apart at the first sign of trouble (even if she might have a panic attack and spiral a bit). No, Delores is a survivor. And Machado makes sure that this side of the character is always present – you can see the calculations occurring in her head as she tries to think several steps ahead of their next move.
So while The Horror of Delores Roach isn’t really telling a new story, per se (the series initially aired as a podcast before being adapted into the television series – so, it really isn’t a new story, just a new medium), it’s still an enjoyable watch – if you’re into these kinds of stories. If you’re not a fan of horror, occasional gore, and the dark humor that make the series tick, this one might not be for you. But if that’s in your viewing wheelhouse, The Horror of Delores Roach is a winner.
The Horror of Delores Roach premieres on July 7 on Prime Video. All eight episodes of the first season were provided for review.
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