Writer and actress Pooja Tripathi is used to people being afraid of her. After all, nearly 200,000 Instagram users’ first impression of her is as Thyme: the perpetually stolid, aggressively anti-establishment, eye-rolling barista behind the counter at the fictional Brooklyn coffee shop. Tripathi’s character plays into the Internet stereotype of the hipster barista, a “pretentious asshole” too cool for most conversations and most coffee orders. In BCS you almost never get what you want. Thyme doesn’t look up from his book.Can we all be feminists? (2018), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Resist AI (2022) or one of her favorites, ‘Yass Kapital’: when you walk in, and if she does, it’s only to frown at you. Your co-worker, Kale, played by Darryl Gene Daughtry Jr, constantly makes jokes at your expense. The prices are outrageous, the hours are completely random, and the space is dimly lit to prevent photography (as an act of rebellion against the surveillance state). Forget your basic black coffees and cappuccinos. Brooklyn Coffee Shop only serves drinks made with substitute milks: raw avocado pit, barley, flax, melon seeds, acorn, and of course, breast milk. (If Felicia, your inner goat, isn’t too emotionally drained, goat milk is also an option.) Being a customer here is heartbreaking, but to be a barista, there is only one requirement: having mastered “the look of disgust.”
“When DJ and I are out and about, sometimes people say they didn’t recognize us at first because we were smiling and they were so used to seeing us scared and frowning,” Tripathi reveals. When I admit that I, too, was nervous at the prospect of this interview, he laughs. “I think right now on the Internet, the line between reality and fiction is blurred and a lot of creators, including us, play with that line. So people don’t see you as an actor if you’re an online content creator,” he notes, “but I consider this a show and Thyme is a role that I wrote for myself.”
When you first discover their Instagram page, Brooklyn Coffee Shop appears to be a real space. “Artisan coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. All milks are made in-house,” the bio reads. Creating content for social networks has many advantages. For Tripathi, the short format (each episode is about a minute long) doesn’t seem restrictive. In a competitive ecosystem where brands, influencers and celebrities fight for attention, she is confident in the show’s ability to keep people engaged. “If you see a comedy like 30 rock, Everything is prepared in the studio, but to my surprise, they keep coming up with more and more ideas without it seeming monotonous,” marvels the 32-year-old. “I actually like the challenge of keeping it short. Sometimes these restrictions fuel creativity because they force us to think about what else we can do within a limit.”
He concludes that TikTok and Instagram have been nothing but beneficial to his creative pursuits: “If it weren’t for social media, this wouldn’t be a show at all. What’s really difficult about traditional media is that you need so many people to say yes to you and even getting to the room where they can decide yes or no is a long road.” Creating a social spectacle was Tripathi’s way of democratizing both the creation and consumption of art and regaining control. “It was a way of saying that I’d love to have a TV show, but there’s something we can do in the meantime. But then, along the way, I realized that this, in itself, was an interesting project.”
