As with any exotic item on a menu, convincing newcomers to try the dark delicacies of The Horror of Dolores Roach depends entirely upon word of mouth. But the Amazon series starring Justina Machado as a downtrodden woman who becomes a reluctant serial killer to protect herself from the various predators circling her neighborhood has been struggling with two disadvantages.

One, it’s such a strange creation that it almost defies description. Calling it a blistering social satire doesn’t capture its sunny approach to the macabre. The story takes place in New York’s vibrant Washington Heights community and involves disposing of bodies through baked goods, so one might call it In the Heights crossed with Sweeney Todd—minus the music. (Except, actually costar Cyndi Lauper does contribute a song about the besieged title character.) Suffice to say, The Horror of Dolores Roach is as uplifting and joyful as a cannibalism story could possibly be.

The show’s other word-of-mouth problem is that the lips of its creators and stars are sealed, at least as long as the Hollywood strikes drag on. Dolores Roach debuted all of its episodes at once on the streaming service July 7, a week before the actors joined the writers in a walkout that has sidelined them from promoting their work, even if it is work they believe in. Social media influencers have also been warned by the guild not to hype films and TV shows presented by struck companies, which further stifles the chatter.

Dolores Roach, perhaps more than other shows this summer, needed its talent out there stoking the conversation as tentative viewers gave it a shot. The “spooky season” of autumn would be especially rich for building interest in the horror-comedy, just as Amazon is deciding whether to renew it for a second season. Instead, Dolores Roach has been one of the primary victims of the stoppage—a show about working-class people who literally eat the rich, stifled by a knock-down, drag-out between laborers and employers.

Creator and co-showrunner Aaron Mark had shepherded The Horror of Dolores Roach for nearly a decade, from its origins as an off-Broadway play in 2015 to its first adaptation as a dramatic podcast in 2018. He describes it as a necessary choice to stand away from the show's distributor just as Dolores Roach was hitting screens. “I was able to do some press arranged through my personal PR, through my manager. But I didn't go to premiere events that were Amazon sanctioned. I didn't go to our press junket," he says. "I didn't do anything that was official.” (For this article, Mark was reached by Vanity Fair through his manager, per WGA guidance to members. The actors have much tighter restrictions from their guild banning all media interviews no matter how they are coordinated.)

Even more significantly, Mark also had to halt all work on the second season he hopes to get. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m emphatically with the guild on this,” Mark says. “I am proud to stop that work. We’ve had to stop that work. It was very, very necessary for us to stop that work.”

That doesn’t make it any less painful, especially as the show about a desperately unlucky woman now struggles to build an audience. “It’s been a long and winding journey. At every step, each of those previous incarnations almost didn’t happen many times,” Mark says. “I was talking to Justina the other day, and we were just sort of laughing about it. Isn’t it the most Dolores thing? The show finally gets its time, we get in front of the world—Here it is!—and it’s like, womp, womp.”

Amazon Prime doesn’t release specific viewership information, even to the show’s creators, but even those who made it always knew something so peculiar would be a slow burn. “It has to be nurtured,” says Jason Blum, executive producer of Dolores Roach and head of Blumhouse Productions, known for Insidious, Get Out, and M3gan. “I don’t have results of how well the show did the first season, but what I’ve heard is that it did pretty well—it did okay. It didn’t make any records, but it didn’t disappear either. Obviously, whenever you make something original like this, it needs special care.”

This is one of the perils of putting something unique into the marketplace—people aren’t sure right away whether they want to buy in. “Throughout my career, that’s one thing I am acutely aware of,” Blum says. “When you’re trying to do something different and groundbreaking, the audience initially is tentative. Then over time you build an audience.”

Blum said he has been advised by Amazon that the streamer will wait until after the strike before deciding whether to renew it or not. “I’m very hopeful that Amazon will give us a second season and a second shot at it. I think the audience who found it was very passionate about it, and I think we could really grow that audience,” Blum says. “It is the kind of show that really is more sensitive to talent support and talent talking about it. I wish the strike were over for a lot of reasons, including Dolores Roach. The strike is bad for everybody.”

Dolores Roach straddles so many genres, and takes such a playful approach to its grisly subject matter that it doesn’t easily appeal to any one fan base. People looking for laughs might be scared off; those seeking terror might shrug at the humor. But Dolores Roach harbors mainstream appeal like predecessors in this territory, including Little Shop of Horrors, director John Waters’s Serial Mom, or Cary Grant’s 1944 screwball black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. 

“I love to use the word underdog,” says Mark. “I have often said, I view the Dolores story as an exercise in identification. And we’re used to mainstream horror in the US being about fear of the other. It’s about the monster, the alien, the person we don’t identify with. And Dolores, going back to the play, is about all of us. We’re going to walk you through, step by step by step, why you may do the exact same thing. She’s about a survival instinct that many of us like to pretend we don’t have.”

There’s something cathartic and crowd-pleasing about Marc Maron’s bitterly offensive landlord getting his comeuppance by way of becoming a pastry filling. And apart from a small sprinkling of deliberately shocking scenes, which squeamish viewers can easily glimpse through their fingers, The Horror of Dolores Roach doesn’t revel in violence or gore. On the contrary, the human-stuffed empanadas are golden brown, crispy, and…delicious-looking. 

The neighborhood customers go mad for them. Dolores’s chef and chief body disposer, Luis (played by Alejandro Hernández), even names his recipe “Muy Loca,” which translates to “very crazy”—a phrase that clearly has multiple meanings. The mystery-meat empanadas start to save their humble street-side restaurant. 

The show’s food stylist, Panamanian chef Rossy Earle, created half-moon pastry props that were appetizing to look at, even if what was supposedly inside them was stomach-turning. “That sort of disconnect is very much at the heart of the whole piece,” Mark says. “Are we on Dolores’s side or are we not? Is she the villain? Is she the victim? She spends the series going, ‘Oh, my God, is this who I am? Am I the monster?’ So that duality trickles down to every aspect of the show, including the empanadas. We know in our brains, This is so fucked up, this is so wrong and perverse, and yet…we start to salivate. There is something involuntary that happens.”

Earle also got into character work with her food, creating “special empanada recipes for each of the dead bodies,” Mark says. “So when they’re eating the empanada from one character, it’s a different recipe than the one she created for the first one, which is Marc Maron’s character.”

Since the show’s actors and background extras would be consuming them on camera, the empanadas had to be edible rather than plaster sculptures glazed with varnish. “She would say to me that she wants the reaction we see onscreen from the background folks eating those empanadas to be absolutely real,” Mark said. “She would just beam watching these people who— God only knows how often they put random food in their mouths on a set—would be delighted by how delicious and unique they were.”

You’ll have to take his word on that. Until the strike is over, the cast can’t open their mouths.