General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Slip

Slip is an American comedy-drama television series written, directed by, and starring Zoe Lister-Jones, in which a married woman slips into parallel universes, each one a life she could have lived with a different partner, after a one-night stand.¹ The series consists of seven half-hour episodes, was produced by Boat Rocker Studios and Dakota Johnson and Ro Donnelly's TeaTime Pictures, and was originally commissioned by Roku in the United States.¹ It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 16, 2023, and was released on The Roku Channel on April 21, 2023.²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Seven half-hour episodes (7 x 30'), a genre-bending relationship drama¹
Creator	Written, directed by, and starring Zoe Lister-Jones, who also executive produced and served as showrunner¹^•³
Lead role	Mae Cannon, a 30-something New York museum curator married for 13 years to Elijah (Whitmer Thomas)¹^•⁴
Premise	After a one-night stand, Mae wakes up in a parallel universe where she is married to that man; each subsequent encounter transports her to another reality¹^•⁴
Release	SXSW premiere March 16, 2023; The Roku Channel April 21, 2023; later announced for Peacock in the U.S.²^•¹
Production	Boat Rocker Studios and TeaTime Pictures; executive producers include Lister-Jones, Ivan Schneeberg, David Fortier, Nick Nantell, Dakota Johnson, Ro Donnelly, and Katie O'Connell Marsh¹
Rating and scores	TV-MA; IMDb 6.5, Rotten Tomatoes 100%⁵

Spoilers

Premise and structure

Mae Cannon is bored and restless in a marriage that the series sets up as stale and unexciting: she has been with her husband Elijah for 13 "perfectly fine, if unexciting, years."¹ After meeting an intriguing man in a bar and spending the night with him, she wakes up in a parallel universe where she is married to that one-night stand.¹ The mechanism repeats: each time Mae has an orgasm with a new partner, she is transported to another reality, so that over a few days she cycles through different relationship configurations, partners, and lives.⁴

Across the seven episodes, Mae navigates four distinct alternate realities in addition to her original one.⁶ In one sequence she dreams of an endless row of doors in an empty space, each door containing a possible world.⁶ The series is concerned with what could have been had Mae made different romantic choices, and it ends with her back in her original reality with a newfound appreciation for her relationship and her life.⁶ Her return is tied to mending her platonic friendship with her best friend Gina, even though her stated goal is to get back to Elijah.⁷

Cast and characters

The credited cast includes Zoe Lister-Jones as Mae Cannon, Tymika Tafari as Gina, Whitmer Thomas as Elijah, Amar Chadha-Patel as Eric, and Emily Hampshire as Sandy.⁵ In one alternate reality Mae is a queer mother raising a young daughter with a character played by Hampshire, known for Schitt's Creek.³ Chadha-Patel plays the famous musician with whom Mae has the one-night stand that starts the chain of slips.³

Production and distribution

Slip was produced by Boat Rocker Studios, an independent entertainment company, together with TeaTime Pictures, the company of Dakota Johnson and Ro Donnelly.¹ It was originally commissioned by Roku in the United States, and Boat Rocker Studios distributes the series globally.¹ Lister-Jones executive produced alongside Boat Rocker's Ivan Schneeberg, David Fortier, and Nick Nantell, with Johnson, Donnelly, and Katie O'Connell Marsh executive producing for TeaTime Pictures.¹

The series premiered as an Official Selection in the TV Premieres section at SXSW 2023.⁸ It was released on The Roku Channel on April 21, 2023 in the United States, Australia, and France, with a Swedish release following on June 5, 2023.² In France it was acquired by the channel OCS.⁴ Boat Rocker later announced that Slip would stream on Peacock in the U.S. beginning April 20, in an announcement dated April 14, 2026.¹

Reception and critical context

Critics grouped Slip with a wave of half-hour comedy-dramas about women in time loops and parallel universes, alongside Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019 to 2022) and Undone (Amazon Prime Video, 2019 to 2022).⁹ Slip premiered in 2023, after the two-season runs of both of those series had concluded, and its premise is described as another spin on parallel realities and roads not taken.⁶

The scholar Sarah Lahm, writing on serial repetition and time-loop narratives in women-centric US television, identifies two ways Slip differs from Russian Doll and Undone: its narrative trajectory revolves around romantic, heterosexual love despite the subplot centered on Mae's friendship with Gina, and it reaches a positive outcome, a metaphorical closing of the loop, whereas the other two series lack resolution.⁷ She also notes that Mae's trajectory is repetitive and loopy in a way that foregrounds self-improvement, with Mae learning different lessons in each parallel reality that she carries forward to the next, and that unlike the other two series, which thematize mental distress throughout, Slip touches on it only briefly, in a scene where Mae searches the Internet for symptoms of schizophrenia.⁷

Reviewers responded to the premise's mix of the absurd and the intimate. Time magazine listed Slip among 15 shows readers might have missed in 2023, calling it "an absurd but psychologically revealing, not to mention quite sexy, hidden gem of a half-hour dramedy," and describing it as a lighter example of the same New York City surrealist sensibility as Russian Doll, Search Party, and Broad City.³ Le Monde praised the series as an excellent discovery that confirmed OCS's flair for foreign acquisitions, noting that Mae, like many victims of spatio-temporal loops, ultimately wants to find her old life again.⁴ On aggregate scores the series holds 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.5 on IMDb.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Sitcom and comedy series › American sitcoms and comedy series › 2020s cable and streaming comedies

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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