Zoe Lister-Jones’ new Roku series, “Slip,” has taken the fascination with metaverses to a whole new dimension — courtesy of a few Earth-moving orgasms that take her out of this world. Literally.
“Slip” centers on Lister-Jones’ character, Mae Cannon, whose life is “a super banal dream where nothing really happens” and the excitement happens when she is dreaming. Or is her dream world reality?
“You just need to wake up, but then you realize there’s nothing to wake up from because the dream is occurring while you’re awake, sleeping to find meaning and waking to lose it,” she says at the start of the Roku series. “And all you wanna do is sleep to dream of something more.”
The series — which, like the indie features she’s best known for, Lister-Jones created, wrote, directed and stars in — is both funny and profound, which rarely happens. She wrote the entire first season during the COVID lockdown, as she was struggling with depression and “a sort of sense of stuckness, of restlessness in my own life, and I didn’t know how to navigate it.”
“For me, as a writer, every project begins with a sort of existential question/crisis that I’m facing personally, and I think I use writing as a way for me to try to find some answers to the tougher questions that we contend with in life and what we do with a desire for more. It got all the louder in quarantine, obviously,” she told TheWrap. “Those voices sort of became impossible to ignore.”
Lister-Jones admitted that she is a person who will meet someone and, even if she feels just the slightest connection, she’ll flash forward to an entire life together in her mind. “And I thought it was such a fun conceit to be able to actually see what those fantasies would look like lived out, to use orgasm as sort of mode of transport, because I was also really interested in exploring female desire and female sexuality in a way that was really central to the narrative.”
And that it is. Whenever Mae has an orgasm, she wakes up the following morning to discover she has been transported to a parallel universe in which her bedmate is her spouse and her life in drastically different.
“The courage it takes to really explore all facets of a self, which, allegorically, I think this show is about and the sort of hungry ghosts that live within us all. You know, the insatiable nature of what it is to be human and how we deal with all the ‘what ifs’ that plague us in a life,” Lister-Jones said. “[That], I think, in quarantine came into such hyper focus. There was such a nostalgic quality of like, ‘Should I have married my high school boyfriend?’ All of those questions of how do I find that sense of internal safety and balance?”
Although the show hasn’t been given a green light for a second season, they did green light a writers room, so all scripts are written for a sophomore year.
“Without giving away any spoilers, it is a bats–t second season and also has sex as it’s propulsive force,” she teases. “In Season 1, Mae is not the agent of her own change or self-discovery. She’s being catapulted from world to world and she’s just sort of trying to catch up. In Season 2, I wanted to create a narrative in which she was shepherding her own ship.”
“Slip” is definitely a wild ride, one that shows off Lister-Jones’ talent as a writer, director and actor who brings a depth of emotion – whatever it might be – to every scene.
“If you’re looking to have fun and go on a really wild adventure but also be turned on,” this is the show for you, she said. “ I really wanted to make a show that was sexy and sex forward, and that was still irreverent and funny and escapist and also dealing with a very universal question that we’re all facing, whether we’re in a relationship or not, of how do we find happiness and what do we do with all of our desires for more.”
You can check out our entire interview with Lister-Jones in the video at the top of this page.
A full season on “Slip” is streaming now on Roku.
