Bar Talk / The Night is Young & The World is Bigger than Ever

Hey there! We’re the co-creators of Bar Talk, a docuseries of unscripted conversations between everyday New Yorkers. Each week, we invite a new pair of friends to sit down at the bar and have a chat like they normally would on a night out. The aim, over the course of the show, is to create a portrait of the city through all its walks of life, in a casual tone.

We’re fascinated by the authenticity of this kind of discourse—conversations that aren’t fragmented and sensational but rather relaxed, intimate, longform. There’s also something a little tantalizing about that conversation a few seats down at the bar, the one we keep catching snippets of… What are they talking about, we wonder? What’s their story? Maybe we’re all a little more honest, a little more curious and open, when we get together with friends and imbibe. And maybe these seemingly trivial conversations are actually much more than meets the eye. A kind of keyhole view into the abundant reality we all share. The day-to-day frustrations, dreams, and conspiratorial musings that can make a city sizzle with life.  

The show, at its heart, is about rekindling conversation and community. A decade of political polarization, a global pandemic, an exodus from urban centers, all of us buzzing around our apartments all day doing remote work… It’s hard in some ways to look around and feel that something hasn’t been lost—our social dialogue, our sense of togetherness. When did we stop talking to one another? Where in our multiscreen lives do we still have the space to catch up, to reminisce, to aspire?

The Idea

The concept came to us, as you might expect, on a night out of our own. We were kicking it at the bar, talking about literature. We’re both writers, the buzz kicked in, maybe the music got a few notches louder. In any case, we began discussing Literature with a capital L, leaving behind the particulars of our own work. We were dreaming, we were philosophizing, we were hopelessly rambling. Then we abandoned the topic altogether and all of a sudden we were back to ourselves, the tiny ways in which we have left marks on the world, the visions we both had of maybe, one day, producing something restorative and significant. Our souls were spent by the end of the night. When we asked for the check, we realized we were both curious about what revelatory conversations others might strike up once they reached that tipping point. People completely different from us. We took it a step further. Imagine an archive of all those conversations—all that wonder and joy and heartbreak—happening in NYC, right now. And the next day Bar Talk was born.  

Two friends, zero agenda, keeping it real at the local bar.

Peace + Love,

Andrew & Mauricio

***

If you like our work, you can support Bar Talk on our Patreon. Your contribution goes a long way, as our YouTube videos tend to be ineligible for monetization due to the bar's background music.

Bar Talk is fiscally sponsored by Creative Visions, a 501c3 nonprofit organization that supports creative activists, those that use the arts and media to ignite social change.