On a dead-end street lined with smash repairers in the Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, a 26-year-old filmmaker named Noah Blau trained his Sony camcorder on Aitana Doyle, an aspiring actress and restaurant server, as she anxiously practised for her driving test.

Blau was taping an episode for his cult Instagram show, Errands, which documents his friends undertaking tasks around New York City with an approach that elevates their mundane missions into hero’s journeys. Episodes have included an excursion to hang a window curtain and a trip to replace a broken skateboard.

Wearing red socks and Tevas, Blau interviewed Doyle outside the rental Chevy she was using to practise parallel parking along the desolate street.

“Aitana, explain to me the situation,” Blau said.

“Today I’m taking my driver’s test,” Doyle, 23, said. “I started lessons two years ago, but I kept getting scared and chickening out. But now I need it. Because I keep doing acting jobs where I drive, and I keep lying about having my driver’s licence.

“Either I’ve got it in the bag or I’m going to fail miserably.”

Blau handed her the yellow legal pad that serves as the show’s title card. “I [heart emoji] Errands,” it read. He filmed her as she held it up.

Nervously, Doyle got in the car and eased into a spot. She then opened the door and triumphantly evaluated her proximity to the curb.

“Noah’s show helps people appreciate the little wins in life,” Doyle said afterwards. “The people on his show aren’t celebrities like on Subway Takes. They’re average Joes going about their day. Sometimes you spend your day accomplishing nothing but an errand, and that’s important, too.”

Since Blau posted the first episode of Errands 10 months ago – it followed a friend named Marta and her quest to find a pink wig – the show has won a small yet feverish following.

Filmed in lo-fi style and accompanied by trippy jazz flute scores, the show approaches errands like urban odysseys. There’s one about a poet named Bernard who brings his broken CD player to an appliance repair store in Chinatown. Another follows an unemployed writer named Brittany as she sells her paperbacks at a book shop. An actor named Jeremy searches for his lost cat.

Jeremy never ends up finding his cat, and failure is a theme of the show. Another episode follows a DJ named Declan, who goes to traffic court hoping to contest what he considers an unjust biking ticket, only to encounter an unsympathetic judge. “We won some, we lost some,” Declan says afterwards, smoking a cigarette.

“The failure rate is actually really high,” Blau said. “At first I thought that was going to be a problem, but it’s only been great for the show. The show is about: ‘I set out to do something, and did I accomplish it?’ So as mundane as the errand might be, everyone understands that feeling.”

Another element of the show’s appeal, he said, has to do with its glimpses into the banal moments of everyday life.

“All great films are voyeuristic in some way,” Blau said, “and now we’re all voyeuristic online. People get embarrassed when they’re seen carrying toilet paper home. But why is that? We know you use toilet paper. There’s something attractive and illicit about seeing someone do private things in public.”

Raised in Baltimore, Blau grew up in a journalistic household. His father was an editor at The Baltimore Sun, and his mother was a food writer for the Chicago Tribune. When he was 6, Blau filmed a ladybird with a digital camera and posted the video on YouTube (it got 100 views). At 10, while documenting his sister’s bat mitzvah, he ended up filming her interview with their grandfather about the Holocaust.

As a student at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Blau grew engrossed in the work of cinema verite auteurs like Frederick Wiseman and Ross McElwee while also immersing himself in the New York canon of John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese.

“Scorsese’s After Hours is like the ultimate errand,” he said. “That would be my dream episode – for someone to get so sidetracked on their errand that they get chased through SoHo by an angry mob, like in the film.”

Around the time he posted his first episode in 2025, SubwayTakes was surfacing incessantly on social media algorithms. Its sunglasses-clad host, Kareem Rahma, had started out interviewing young New York creatives on rattling trains. Once the talk show blew up, he began featuring celebrities like Cate Blanchett and Jennifer Lopez, as well as sponsored posts with companies like Google.

When asked if he hoped Errands might take off in a similar fashion, Blau mulled his answer.

“I love SubwayTakes, and my show exists in a post-SubwayTakes world, but I don’t want the show to become a press stop,” he said.

“If I were to have Taylor Swift on Errands, that would probably be the worst thing that could happen to it.

“I think people like my show because it’s made for no money and makes no money. I think that helps keep it pure.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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