Your coffee order says everything about who you are. Plain black without sugar screams old-school, efficient, and honestly, "who hurt you?". The cappuccino with foam art is for the basic bitches (sorry!) and and the iced matcha latte with dairy-free milk and a scientific customisation speaks to a very Gen Z-coded sense of hyper-individualism. Cafés today have evolved into the wild wild West of curated identity — shaped by micro-trends and cultural semiotics, where taste is both aesthetic and ideology. These theatres of self-performance and the weird little niches they are comprised of, become the playground of the beloved Instagram & TikTok series Brooklyn Coffee Shop.

Created by Pooja Tripathi, a New York-based writer, producer, and performer, Brooklyn Coffee Shop is a satirical series that distills the internet’s most peculiar subcultures into tightly composed, hyperreal vignettes set in a fictional café. The series constructs a microcosm of the modern urban life in a digital age where aesthetics, belief systems, and social capital collide. With sharp worldbuilding, deadpan humour, and a precise understanding of internet folklore, it paints an incisive and chaotic picture of the zeitgeist.

The series delivers some heavy critique but through the lighthearted premise of sketches. Its tone comes from absurd comedies that Pooja has always been a huge fan of. She counts 'Portlandia' and Lena Dunham’s 'Girls' as formative influences, both of which combine observational wit with an irreverent lens on urban pretentiousness. Add 'My Favorite Shapes' and 'Fantasmas' by Julio Torres to the mix , and you begin to understand the show’s DNA. “Comedy always has a kernel of truth at the core,” Pooja notes. “Even if it’s exaggerated and heightened for a sketch, I think that core truth is what hooks people.”

Pooja had been making comedy videos for social media for 2 years, including one about a snarky barista character and customers in a Brooklyn coffee shop. The concept turned into a series when cinematographer Eyal Cohen suggested filming it in a real café. “He’s extremely talented and I knew that with him, the videos would look amazing,” Pooja says. She wrote four episodes, cast friends, cold-emailed a handful of coffee shops until one said yes, and they made the first batch. One episode hit 8 million views on Instagram, another 3 million on TikTok, with the rest comfortably in the million-plus range, which encouraged them to make more.

What the series understands better than most is the performative nature of authenticity. Coffee culture, particularly in urban hubs like New York or Los Angeles, has become so contorted with performance, persona, and lifestyle branding that it has turned into a caricature of itself. And Brooklyn Coffee Shop is a surreal and hyperrealistic rendering of this world.

This includes eccentric characters like finance bros grappling with moral dilemmas, spitirual-chic wellness influencers, and anti-capitalist baristas who upsell mushroom lattes. “A lot of our characters take themselves very seriously within their ridiculous niche worlds,” Pooja shares. In a short 7-episode sci-fi miniseries, they even take the setting into post-humanist timelines, set a 100 years from now which Pooja co-wrote with Benton McClintock.

The show’s diasporic consciousness is also one of its richest undercurrents. Pooja being of South Asian Heritage brings a deeper insight into into the episodes. “I’ve always quietly taken note of the many ways Indian cultural practices are referenced, warped and monetized in Western culture,” she says. "You can find endless 'yogis' in New York and LA who have traveled to Southeast Asia, South America, Bali etc and made it into their entire personality. At the end of the day, you can tell when it’s not genuine because those cultural practices are supposed to be about something greater than yourself, and the people who appropriate them are usually very focused on themselves".

Pooja acknowledges that her satire is aimed at audiences who may be complicit in the very behaviours she's critiquing, including herself. But the comedic tone of the series becomes a way for her to explore this space of aestheticization of culture with a lens that's critical, but more self aware than sanctimonious.

For such a singular, sharp voice we have come to love the series for, its production is surprisingly intimate and independent. “Brooklyn Coffee Shop is made by a very small team of NYC creatives who are all my friends and are each amazing at what they do,” Pooja says.

Eyal Cohen is the cinematographer who also handles lighting design, colouring, and visual effects. Nitay Dagan directs and edits, while Sagi Shahar does sound design. Assistant Director Veronica Hein handles on-set sound, and Hannah Meholick works as Associate Producer. With an incredible eye for comedy, the editing team of Itamar Azulay and Hudson Flynn have been known to fine tune original scripts. Then there's DJ Daughtry in the role of Cale. He's a Juilliard trained actor and Pooja's co-barista in the series, and has improvised some of the funniest lines on the spot.

“I produce and write each episode,” Pooja adds, “and sometimes I co-write with the guest if they’re interested in being more involved in the process.” Every episode, the guests bring their unique comedic instincts that they have been honing on their own channels, elevating the characters on the series. “If there are characters they are known for, I love having them visit the coffee shop because audiences love to see crossovers of their favorite internet worlds," Pooja notes.

Which is perhaps the most striking and characterizing aspect of the series. With recurring characters and crossovers that echo the ensemble dynamics of classic television, but reimagined through the lens of digital creators and meme culture, Brooklyn Coffee Shop emerges as a new-age sitcom for the internet; self-referential, yet interconnected.

In many ways, the series underlines the creator economy as the self-sustaining hub of information and entertainment, that it is gradually evolving into. Unlike the rhetoric of traditional media that has always felt a little distant from people's realities, this is a more democratic ecosystem that's in consistent and immediate dialogue with the rhythms of contemporary life — and it does so with style, substance, and subtext.

"More and more shows will pop up as creators evolve to working with new formats. I’ve already seen some cool projects that comedians I know are posting online, and the quality seems to keep rising", Pooja shares. "I think it’s only the beginning for the new world of entertainment that’s being built online."

Follow Pooja here and Brooklyn Coffee Shop here.

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