Secret Billionaires, Mafia Brides, Alpha Kings: The Insane World of Microdramas
New York Times · LC · trust 30/100
Sexy werewolves, boy-toy mafiosos, homeless guys who are secretly billionaires: Welcome to the world of the microdrama.
Each episode is short, soapy and over-the-top, and studios are churning them out for cheap. Hundreds of millions of people are watching them.
Are 60-Second Microdramas the Future of Hollywood, or the End?
In 2020, the entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg brought to life an idea that must have seemed — in the flash of its conception — foolproof: Netflix, but for people addicted to their phones. This would be a short-form entertainment app for a new kind of viewer, one for whom watching an entire episode of “The Office” or “Criminal Minds” represented an intolerable mental strain. He called it Quibi: short for “quick bites.” It collapsed after eight months in a total void of public interest. People laughed about this, but their laughter was tinged with pride. A billionaire had insulted our intelligence and — this time, at least — had been rebuked.
And yet, the joke may very well be on us. Or on us and on Katzenberg at the same time. Because, just six years later, short-form, mobile-first narrative entertainment is the fastest-growing form of streaming worldwide, per Bloomberg. Maybe you’ve seen something called the “microdrama.” Maybe you are reading this very article clause by clause between episodes of “My Gorgeous Wife Is an Ex-Convict” or “Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas” or “Deadly Affair With My Brother-in-Law.”
If they haven’t hit your feed yet, here are the basics: Microdramas, sometimes called “verticals,” are TV shows for your phone. They are typically described as soap operas for Gen Z: hypersexual, over the top and — most important — short, with episodes rarely exceeding two minutes in length. The format was born around 2018 in China, where its revenue now exceeds that of the conventional film industry. America is lagging behind, but it is putting in the work. As I write this, the form is on track to take in $1.5 billion in revenue in the United States by the end of the year.
People used to compare the experience of watching prestige TV shows like “The Sopranos” to reading a great Victorian novel. By the same token, we can say that watching a microdrama is like being electrocuted onstage at the circus. If I sound hyperbolic, it is because there is no way to rationally respond to a medium designed to short-circuit rational thought. Factually, we can say that these microdramas are rooted in the character and plot tropes of romantasy: Secret Admirer, say, or Enemies-to-Lovers. Each short episode opens with a hook and ends with a twist, dragging viewers, like recalcitrant pets, through entire seasons roughly the length of a feature film. Production values vary, but on the whole they suggest a highly capable regional-commercial crew press-ganged into shooting a network drama at top speed. And the dialogue! To call it bad would be to lend too much intentionality to a process whereby scripts are often A.I.-translated from Chinese, and then lightly, sometimes barely, localized to fit the conventions of American culture.
In the first years of this decade, a number of Chinese companies began to export the form abroad, creating countless U.S. microdrama apps and coordinating U.S.-based microdrama shoots in order to supply those apps with content. These companies still retain a near monopoly on U.S. production, but that is quickly changing. Hollywood executives — noticing these apps outranking their own streamers on the charts — have started to spin up microdrama platforms of their own. Just last month saw the launch of aTwist, the highest-profile American venture yet, founded in part by former executives at Showtime and NBCUniversal. Many others are on the way. Speaking to The Guardian last year, Anthony Zuiker, the creator of “C.S.I.,” suggested — not implausibly — that the form would soon supplant streaming at the “forefront of consumption,” as streaming once supplanted cable. In the space of a few weeks last year, The Hollywood Reporter declared a “gold rush,” while Variety heralded the “vertical revolution.”
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