Soraya Roberts

Toronto

Writer and Editor at Freelance

Contributing Writer at Defector

culture writer. contributing @defectormedia. IN MY HUMBLE OPINION: MY SO-CALLED LIFE (ECW, 2016). UNTITLED CULTURAL HISTORY (LIVERIGHT, 2025). firstlast @ gmail

Articles

'Ludwig' Gets Cozy With David Mitchell's Limits

3 weeks ago | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

In the modest new British detective series Ludwig, comedian David Mitchell—who you will likely know as uptight office drone Mark Corrigan from Jesse Armstrong’s very pre-Succession cult hit Peep Show—plays the shut-in twin of what appears to have been a much livelier detective who goes missing.
What The Beads Can Tell You

1 month ago | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

A week after Doug Ford (our provincial version of Trump, in every sense of the word) handily won the premiership of Ontario for a third time in a row, and within days of the announcement that some fucking banker was taking over as the new Prime Minister of Canada, I was in The National Gallery of Canada looking confused. I looked like this because I thought they had put a J-cloth, smeared in oil, behind a glass case and called it art.
'Black Box Diaries' Splits A Journalist In Two

2 months ago | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

The “black box” in the title of Shiori Itō’s documentary Black Box Diaries, in which the journalist investigates her own sexual assault, essentially refers to the excuse Japan gives for not properly investigating rape cases.
There's Always Room For More Merritt Wever

2 months ago | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

I was sleepwatching through the first two episodes of Severance. It’s not an easy show to get into. It’s sterile because it’s supposed to be—it’s a show about a biotech company called Lumon whose employees have the option of severing their brains so that one version of them goes to the office (the “innie”), while the other (the “outie”) can just live their life. Neither of them ever has to meet—they do not share a consciousness.
'Somebody Somewhere' Is A Dream Without A Deadline

Nov 12, 2024 | xpresschronicle.com | Soraya Roberts

Bridget Everett is 52. She was 48 when HBO took on her show Somebody Somewhere, now in its third and final season. The show, in which she plays the lead character, Sam, loosely depicts Everett’s own life, or at least the one she would have lived if she had stayed in Kansas instead of moving to New York, where she eventually became a downtown alt-cabaret star.
'Somebody Somewhere' Is A Dream Without A Deadline

Nov 12, 2024 | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

Bridget Everett is 52. She was 48 when HBO took on her show, Somebody Somewhere, now in its third and final season. The show, in which she plays the lead character, Sam, loosely depicts Everett’s own life, or at least the one she would have lived if she had stayed in Kansas instead of moving to New York, where she eventually became a downtown alt-cabaret star.
In Communion With MJ Lenderman

Oct 25, 2024 | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

There’s something cathartic about a room full of strangers singing the words, “You don’t know the shape I’m in.” It’s not that the crowd wasn’t singing along to most every other song MJ Lenderman played at Montreal’s Fairmount Theatre, but it’s those lyrics – “What else can you say to help/A friend with a broken heart/You don’t know the shape I’m in” – sung not long after a hurricane devastated Lenderman’s home state of North Carolina, that seemed to encompass the questionable shape we are...
'The Tall Guy' Is Richard Curtis At His Pre-Hollywood Best

Oct 8, 2024 | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

About halfway through my millionth encounter with Elephant, the fictional, Andrew Lloyd Webber-spoofing musical that features in the 1989 film The Tall Guy, I thought it might be one of the most perfectly executed pieces of satire in the history of the world.
Folie À Poo: Boredom Is A Joker Sequel

Oct 4, 2024 | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

David Foster Wallace had a thing for boredom. He had such a thing for it that he turned it into a kind of last legacy. According to a lengthy (and pretty great) piece in The New Yorker by D.T. Max published a year after Wallace died by suicide in 2008, he left behind a third of his final novel, The Pale King, for which he had spent countless hours researching boredom.
'Nightbitch' Is About A Woman Clawing Back Her Time

Sep 19, 2024 | defector.com | Soraya Roberts

Nightbitch is billed as a film about an overburdened stay-at-home mom who turns into a dog at night in order to free herself from her shackles. But it’s the night part rather than the bitch part that stands out here. This is a movie about a woman (Amy Adams) whose days have been stolen, who is pushed so far that the narrative has to contort into fantasy in order to break her out of her reality.