Bread and Butter: Funny and Real, Self-Reflexive Series on Surviving the Creative Industries

The 5-minute pilot of Sasha Skulinets’s comedy series Bread and Butter, “What’s the best career advice you have received?” is a spry docu-fiction that makes great use of its mixed genre. 

Starting out sincere and matter-of-fact with sound bites of young people on the lower end of the creative industry ladder in NYC, it smoothly slips into fiction and comedy with Claudia Thiedmann as Karla, a woman working in production.  

Shot in natural light with a handheld camera, frustration and humour dovetail with ease under the familiar device of unceremonious cuts. The Devil Wears Prada already primed us, and then there was the specific and inescapable detailing of overwork in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World: when we learn Karla is also in the production department, we already know what life is like for her, which makes it really easy to sympathise with her struggle, sitting atop a bucket at a crossing trying to get things done.

Then she meets Melanie. Some speedrun retrospection and evasion clothed in euphemisms later, Karla (with or without will) convinces the hopeful Melanie that working in production is creatively rewarding actually. 

Perhaps it is having Do Not Expect colouring our perception and knowledge while approaching this episode (or lived experience), but every sugarcoated statement out of Karla lands razor sharp for the viewer. The combination of low pay, overwork, and generally unreasonable expectations give the comic scene a bitter undertone, made explicit minutes later.  

By the end of “What’s the best career advice you have received?” it seems like the question should really be rephrased from best to kindest. And the answer to that may really be to not expect too much of a dream at the end of the world. 

Watch Bread and Butter Webseries Episode 1