Your Annoying Roommate Is Slaying on TikTok

Sabrina Brier is finding success online in the role of a 20-something in New York who’s trying to shed her basic suburban past.

It was a dark Saturday night last month on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Saturday nights can get very dark, but Sabrina Brier, in a rhinestone necklace and strapless plaid pantsuit, was agleam onstage at a basement comedy club called Caveat warming up the crowd.

That particular joke passed quickly, but the metaphor hung in the air. After some years sweating on the back burner of show business, Ms. Brier, 28, has found instant success on the social media platform of the moment, TikTok. She has over 400,000 followers, and many more fans who view, “like” and share her videos, which mostly parody life as a young woman of some privilege and erratic self-confidence vacillating between the excitement of the city and the reassuring comforts of suburbia. (“You see this nook? Perfect for a pumpkin,” she declared in one about reclaiming fall, the supposed favorite season of “basic” white women. “Don’t blame me, blame the architect!”)

Ms. Brier specializes in point of view, or P.O.V., videos that confront relatable, often hateable characters, with a subtle sneer, gleefully rubbery body and arch delivery of generational catchphrases like “slay, queen” and “I got you,” often repeated for effect. She recently spoofed the Get Ready With Me (GR.W.M.) genre that has women across America smearing makeup on their faces, plugging beauty products and oversharing in equal measure.

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