Can The Horror of Dolores Roach Continue With Season 2?

“We decided to set the events of season one in 2019, pre-Covid, for several reasons, the primary one being it’s pre-Covid any story told during Covid becomes about Covid,” Mark says. “The framing device of the TV series is set four years later, in the present day in 2023. So we have set up a gap in time and given ourselves the ability to tell Dolores’s story starting right now. We’ll fill in what happens in those four years, which may or may not include the events of the second season of the podcast, but I’m much more interested in telling the story of where she is now, four years later, now that she’s become famous.”

Speaking to Mark, and learning about how Dolores Roach was inspired by his time living in Washington Heights, it’s hard not be to reminded that The Horror of Dolores Roach features one character who adapts Dolores’s story for the stage, and a podcast, and eventually for a streaming service, just as Mark has done. In fact, the framing device for the entire series is Dolores cornering the lead actress because she doesn’t like the way her story has been told.

If the Dolores Roach TV series continues, Mark would like to go deeper into that meta-aspect of the story. And as with the first series’ themes of gentrification, it all comes down to cannibalism.

“Should we be lucky enough to keep telling this story for television there will be a lot more of that moving forward,” Mark says. “We will be dealing with the idea of symbolic cannibalism and the idea of Dolores’s life being ripped from her hands, and her neighborhood taken away. I was struck by the idea that all she has left is her own story and the idea that that would be taken from her too was really fascinating to me.”

As Mark points out, it is a timely subject. In 2023, true crime on television is big business. For Dolores, a character who says she just wants to be under the radar, leading a simple, normal life, it is exactly the environment she doesn’t want to end up in.

“She wants quiet,” Mark says. “To make her famous? That is just endlessly fascinating to me. And that’s the story I hope we’re able to continue to tell: What happens when this person who wants no attention at all is suddenly one of the most famous serial killers on the planet?”