Watch the Nightmare Short Film Starring Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector Five Years Before 'The Gilded Age'

Most critics and audiences seem to agree that the just-about-to-end third season of Julian Fellowes’ HBO series The Gilded Age is where the show finally hit its soapy stride—the table settings had been immaculately put into place but the time had come for the Old Money dowagers & New Money drama queens fighting for prominence in 1880s New York Society to start smashing the dishes Dynasty-style. Now we’ve visited the Wild West, the sordid houses of ill-repute, we’ve seen gays trampled by wayward carriage and we’ve gotten a cliffhanger straight out of the Dallas playbook. Literal shots have been fired!

Nowhere has this melodrama landed the hardest than it has in the bed-chambers of the Russell household though, where the once rock-steady marriage between everybody’s favorite “Rail Daddy” George (Morgan Spector) and his social-climbing missus Bertha (Carrie Coon) has totally hit the ropes. After several twists and corkscrew turns the two now speak to each other with an unbridled hostility usually reserved for bankers or scheming maids.

Well it turns out we all should have seen it coming! In 2017, a full five years before anybody slipped themselves into a bustle or slathered on the beard cream, Coon and Spector began duking it out in a surreal horror short film called “Great Choice” from director Robin Comisar that demands to be seen and experienced. Like the love-child of Groundhog Day and that SNL skit where Chris Farley found out he was being secretly defrauded with instant coffee, “Great Choice” finds Coon playing a suburban mom type who realizes she’s trapped inside a grainy vintage television commercial for Red Lobster, all as Spector’s ever-more-manic waiter schemes to keep her there. Cue plentiful fisticuffs and an assault with hot butter you won’t soon forget.

Similar to the surreal horror film Buffet Infinity just reviewed out of the Fantasia Film Festival this week, “Great Choice” mines our familiarity with the tropes of T.V. commercials to nefarious and hilarious end. Since we’re all stuck in a loop of deteriorating late-stage capitalism, why not embrace our disintegration with a side of those friggin’ delicious Cheddar Bay Biscuits?