Five years ago the British-Australian actor Teig Sadhana was walking dogs for a living in Melbourne. Now the 29-year-old is working on shoots where he is paid $1,000 a day — enough to live comfortably in New York. “Casting directors are reaching out to me from all across the film and television industry,” he says. His golden ticket? Roles in micro-dramas, also known as vertical dramas, or “verticals” — cliff-hanger-heavy one-minute episodes that originated in China, which are designed to be watched on smartphones and are taking off worldwide.
Filmed in a vertical format, micro-dramas draw viewers in by letting them watch a few episodes before charging them about $26 a week to see the rest. In China revenue surpassed the cinema box office last year, reaching $6.9 billion. Outside China it was $1.2 billion, with 60 percent coming from America, especially the Silicon Valley-based app ReelShort. The dramas are also on the rise in the UK, with production companies popping up to take advantage of the increasing demand from China. It is a welcome source of income during a time of budget squeezes after pandemic shutdowns and actors’ strikes. In the UK there was a 22 percent drop in domestic high-end TV commissions in 2024 and a 50 percent drop in international co-productions.
I spent an afternoon watching verticals on ReelShort and a Chinese app, DramaBox. Popular themes included forbidden love, billionaires and the mafia (Secret Surrogate to the Mafia King). At the time of writing the top trending drama on ReelShort was Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas, while on DramaBox it was Divorced at the Wedding Day.
Adaptations of classic literature are starting to make appearances too: a modern version of Pride and Prejudice is available on ReelShort. That was produced by Ben Pengilly, a 34-year-old Londoner who has jumped at the opportunity and made 15 verticals for Chinese apps with his company Onset Octopus, including Mafia Lover and Virgin’s Addiction. He is interested in creating his own app for them.
Pengilly used to specialize in music videos for rappers such as Stormzy and Headie One but then saw “the budgets getting worse and worse”, going from $40,000 to as low as $8,000. He heard about verticals through someone he met while working on a commercial job for a Chinese tech company 18 months ago and decided to give it a go.
It’s speedy work, with shoots taking about eight to ten days. On a standard feature film it’s normal to shoot five pages a day on average. Verticals often triple that, while Pengilly once shot 19 pages in a day. That time pressure could sound alarm bells about how the cast are treated. One American editor tells me that he wasn’t paid for his work on a shoot in New York, while an insider working in the UK said a verticals production company here refused to pay its crew. However, Pengilly and another producer I spoke to, Tramy Han from Feuer Media, say they stick to UK union hours.
Some agents refuse to submit their talent for roles in verticals, according to Liyanne Marie, a casting director who works with Pengilly. But she says it gives actors who might never have had a lead role a chance to try it out. “It’s providing a lot of work,” she says.
Quality remains an issue. Some micro-dramas can be painful to watch, like bad bite-sized telenovelas, and many have soft-porn titles such as Captured and Bound by My CEO. Budgets are low — about $150,000 — and the scripts are usually by Chinese writers; production companies then “localize” them by hiring someone bilingual to make the lines sound more idiomatic. There are exceptions: My Very Royal Romance, a vertical directed by Zhizi Hao, a UK-based Chinese director and the founder of First Tone productions, was scripted by a British screenwriter. Hao says verticals “provide bread and butter and make it more possible for me to make my own films”. Every person I ask is confident the scripts are not, and will not be, written by AI.
“What we’re seeing now is an immense drive within the industry for an elevation in the script, which is happening — and for an elevation in production value, which is happening rapidly,” Sadhana says. The telenovela, or soap opera, storylines established a big fan base for the format and now it can go in other directions, he argues. “I’m in conversations with some big movers and shakers who are trying to elevate the space.”
Feedback from fans is shaping the output too. One of the biggest UK fan pages, Vertical Drama Love, has 4,700 subscribers on Instagram and is run by Jen Cooper, a 44-year-old business services entrepreneur from Tunbridge Wells in Kent. A big fan of romantic movies, she “got very bored by Hallmark” and stumbled across verticals on TikTok just over a year ago. “I haven’t really stopped watching them since,” she says, and compares them to the works of Jilly Cooper. Jen Cooper set up verticals awards this year and attracted 16,000 votes from international fans supporting their favorite actors. “People want to escape,” she says of their appeal. “I have no desire to watch Adolescence because that is my daily life. If I’m relaxing, I want to switch off.”
She tries to steer people away from the more problematic verticals. “I want to elevate [them] because it is a bit of a Wild West. Some production companies are great but some do not treat people well. There is a divide at the moment between people who are trying to write really good storylines and the apps that are following the data and doubling down on the more sexual, toxic, violent storylines.” One industry insider told me that they have heard that most US viewers are those who claim to be tired of “woke” content on mainstream platforms such as Netflix.
Cooper says there is not just one type of viewer. “They think the people watching these are Midwestern American women doing really menial jobs and that’s not true,” she says. “I went to Cambridge University [where she studied history] so I confuse them: I’ve got a brain and I watch these.”
She doesn’t think they would be appropriate for her 13 and 15-year-old daughters. But if they wanted to watch them, it would be pretty easy because there isn’t much by way of parental control — just an alert that pops up saying the content may be unsuitable, which viewers can click out of, allowing them to continue watching. “The apps have no interest in [parental control]: they’re just making the money,” Cooper says.
Will mainstream platforms and national broadcasters start to produce micro-dramas? Netflix is rumored to be exploring them, although a representative says they have nothing to share or confirm. In April Sacha Khari, Channel 4’s head of digital commissioning, said they were watching the space closely.
I ask Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, what she thinks of the form. “People are just desperate for stories in their lives,” she says, adding that micro-dramas are a “clever idea” and “a terrific way to make money”, even if they have “no subtlety”.
“By the time you’ve seen 17 massive cliff-hangers, you’re probably desperate to go and watch War and Peace,” she says. “Writing them must be quite difficult. Generally speaking, if you work, as I do, a lot for ITV and Channel 4 you’ve got to come up with a cliff-hanger every 11 or 12 minutes, but coming up with one every minute? That’s clever — off you go!” She laughs.
“Who knows whether it’s worth your while and your money to watch this stuff, but then you feel like that about a lot of telly, don’t you?”
Blanca Schofield is the assistant arts editor at The Times and The Sunday Times of London
