Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make, and watch, scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, James Franco goes vertical under SAG-AFTRA’s new Verticals Agreement, LumiView signs more than 50 writers and authors to build vertical IP, and creator Sachin Kumar launches a studio around his own voice and audience. Then, we dig into The Great Convergence and what it will actually take for legacy entertainment and the creator economy to understand each other, collaborate, and build something new.

But first…

Notable names continue to enter the MicroSeries space. (And by the way… are we officially calling them MicroSeries now? Because if so, I’m all in.) We’re covering one of the latest examples in our news roundup below. While the names keep changing, it feels like the conversation around “big names entering the space” really hasn’t.

One of the things I love most about this sector is the community that has grown around it. It reminds me of the early creator economy: ambitious, collaborative, and built by people who believed in something before the rest of the world caught on. I understand why established stars entering the space can feel threatening to some. But I think it’s a sign of success, not danger. A healthy creative medium should attract great storytellers from every corner of entertainment.

We humans aren’t particularly fond of change. It introduces uncertainty, and uncertainty is uncomfortable. But as the old saying goes, “The only constant is change.” The people who resist it often get left behind. The people who embrace it are usually the ones who help shape what comes next.

The real challenge isn’t preventing change—it’s making sure that growth is inclusive. The creators who built this medium deserve to stand shoulder to shoulder with the talent that’s only now discovering it. Those shouldn’t be competing stories. They should be the same story.

I’m excited for the day when some of the best actors from film, television, and yes, MicroSeries all share the same set, learning from one another and pushing the medium forward together. I think there will be a unique kind of electricity in that collaboration. That’s a future worth building toward.

Alright, let’s get into it.

James Franco Goes Vertical With Love, Lies & Frank

James Franco stars in Love, Lies & Frank, a new 50-episode microdrama now streaming on Shortical. Like PLAYBACK, it’s also among the first productions under SAG-AFTRA’s new Verticals Agreement, meaning Hollywood talent and its labor infrastructure are arriving together.

LumiView Signs 50+ Writers and Authors to Build Vertical IP

LumiView has brought more than 50 authors and screenwriters into its LumiCreator network, with multiple books already headed for vertical adaptation. The bigger bet: using vertical not just as an endpoint, but as an incubator for IP that can expand into film, publishing and games.

Creator Sachin Kumar Launches His Own Vertical Studio

Creator Sachin Kumar has launched Prema Creative Co. alongside Typecast, a 14-part vertical comedy premiering September 7 on Instagram. Rather than plugging a creator into an existing microdrama machine, Kumar is building one around his own voice and audience.

Australia Is Getting Its First Microdrama Forum

Australia will host its first dedicated Microdrama Forum on August 30, followed by a 48-hour vertical filmmaking challenge in September. It’s another sign that local production ecosystems are beginning to form around the format globally.

Kuku TV Turns the Acting Competition Into a Microdrama

India’s Kuku TV has launched Sabse Bada Dramebaaz, a 50-episode vertical acting competition with Meesho and Tinder attached as brand partners. It’s a useful reminder that vertical storytelling grammar can extend well beyond scripted melodrama.

NAB: Hollywood May Have Something to Learn From Verticals

NAB Show argues that vertical production is becoming a testing ground for faster, lower-risk development and creator-economy thinking, with insights from Susan Rovner, Jana Winograde, Dhar Mann Studios and Scott Brown. Increasingly, the question isn’t how vertical can become more like Hollywood, but what Hollywood can learn from vertical.

Six Major Streamers Have Built Vertical Feeds in Six Months

The Ankler notes that Netflix, Prime Video, Peacock, Disney+, Paramount+ and HBO Max have all introduced some form of vertical short-form feed. Much of it is still clips, but vertical viewing is clearly moving from social platforms into the architecture of traditional streaming.

Canela Media Bets on Free, Bilingual Microdrama

Canela Media announced Zully, a free, ad-supported microdrama app launching this fall with English-, Spanish- and Spanglish-language programming. The model is worth watching for its bilingual focus and advertising-first alternative to aggressive episode paywalls.

Editor’s note: This week, Second Rodeo’s own Franziska Harms wanted to write about her observations on the friction as Hollywood and the Creator Economy collide. I’ll let her take it from here.

Dear Hollywood: Creators Aren’t What You Think

(A.K.A. The Great Misunderstanding of the Great Convergence)

For me, one of the biggest sources of friction in the convergence of legacy and digital is a fundamental misunderstanding of each other. The key to navigating this moment is learning how to translate between two systems that grew up very differently.

If you’re coming from legacy and looking to work with creators, I want to offer a few ways of thinking about them that I believe can help you get more out of those partnerships.

My time working at Second Rodeo has given me a front-row seat to the growing pains on both sides. Overall, I’m incredibly optimistic, and I hope these thoughts resonate with players on both sides.

Throughout, I’ll aim to emphasize what I think you stand to gain from this understanding, and what I think you risk leaving on the table if you don’t reframe. Let’s dive in:

Both sides know their own machine works, because it does.

Legacy built a process that has reliably produced great film and television for decades. Digital built theirs a little differently. The Creator Economy was built through trial by fire at 2x speed. From the outside, that can look confusing, even scary, and therefore easy to misunderstand. But out of those constraints, it has reliably produced massive, engaged audiences with a fraction of the resources.

Both systems produce extraordinary results.

The friction starts when either side assumes the best way to collaborate is to slot the other into the machine it already has, instead of asking whether the machine itself needs to flex.

This moment, mid-convergence, is a prompt to be equally open to building the bridge while we’re standing on it.

I think the clearest place to start untangling this is with how we talk about, and talk to, creators. There are still some understandable assumptions about what a creator is and where their value lies, and those assumptions can leave a lot of the picture out.

It’s worth looking more closely at the categories we’ve inherited, unlearning some of their limitations, and building a more complete understanding of who creators actually are. The earlier we do that, the more value there is for everyone at the table.

Creators ≠ Talent (In the Traditional Sense)

A lot of legacy, and a lot of people making microdramas who came up in legacy, default to treating creators as a talent booking: cast them like you’d cast an actor, slot them into a role, done.

That makes complete sense inside a system built around specialization. But it can also obscure what makes digital-native people valuable in the first place.

Look at almost any working creator’s origin story and you’ll find some version of a one-person company.

They didn’t start with a department for that. They were the writer, director, DP, editor, colorist, graphics person, marketing team, and the one reading every comment. Then they made the executive decision to change the next video based on what they learned, knowing they would also have to implement those changes themselves.

That’s not a stack of resume lines. That’s just what it took to get to the next video.

And even when a creator scales, builds a team, and steps away from that day-to-day execution, that experience doesn’t disappear.

Their instincts tend to be unusually cross-functional because they were formed before the functions were separated.

Their thoughts are many: the edit while they’re writing, the marketing while they’re shooting, the thumbnail as they develop the idea, and always, what the audience will say before the thing even exists.

If you understand this: you gain access to a collaborator whose value may extend far beyond the role you originally hired them for.

If you don’t: you risk using only a small part of what they can actually do.

The Sum > Its Parts

I get the instinct to see this as jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I don’t think it’s about stacking hats and then measuring the height. It’s in the synthesis.

A creator holds all of that understanding at once. It’s not sequential, it’s simultaneous. Everything happening everywhere, all at once.

That instinct, the ability to hold the whole machine in your head at every step, is the actual asset.

The person I keep coming back to here is Dhar Mann. I don’t know how hands-on he currently is with the day-to-day execution, but he has the understanding that comes from synthesized, soup-to-nuts experience, and that’s what interests me.

The closest legacy comparison might be an auteur filmmaker, and even that undersells it, because an auteur usually has a studio’s infrastructure behind them. Creators built theirs, so they’re used to owning the whole machine.

If you understand this: you get the benefit of integrated thinking. Decisions about story, audience, packaging, production, and distribution can inform one another much earlier.

If you don’t: you risk breaking the person into their component skills and missing the synthesis that made them successful in the first place. You price and hire for individual skills in isolation, potentially missing the full commercial upside of a creator’s existing audience and creative ecosystem..

The Value You Might Be Leaving on the Table

So if you’re a legacy producer bringing a creator into a microdrama, I’d ask: are you casting them, or are you leaving value on the table by only casting them?

And that question isn’t unique to acting. If you’re bringing a digital person on to direct, are you only slotting them into the traditional director’s chair? If you’re bringing one on to edit, are you just handing them a timeline and a deadline?

Whatever the role, there’s often far more interconnected experience sitting at the table than the job title suggests.

It’s worth asking why Hollywood is turning to creators in the first place. They’ve unlocked something the traditional system hasn’t been able to replicate on its own.

Here’s a small exercise: pick up your phone right now and try to post something that performs well online. If that makes you uneasy, I’d gently push you to sit with why. If it doesn’t scare you at all, I’d challenge you to actually try it. (...and lowkey, if it does well, shoot me a DM and I’ll eat my words and start picking your brain on how we can collab.)

Creators also understand their own audience in a way nobody else in the room does. That knowledge isn’t just useful for the creative. It’s enormously valuable when it comes time to actually reach that audience.

If you understand this: you gain a live source of creative, audience, packaging, and distribution intelligence while you’re actually building the thing.

If you don’t: you risk hiring a creator for their ability to reach an audience, without giving them a voice in the decisions that will determine whether that audience actually shows up.

Buy-In, Not Just a Booking

The way to unlock all of that is buy-in, not just a booking.

That buy-in might come through creative authority, participation in development, ownership, backend, or another clearly defined stake.

The exact structure will vary. The principle doesn’t.

If you’re bringing someone in because of the ecosystem they’ve built, give them enough agency and responsibility to actually apply what they know.

A creator who’s bought in will fight for the project like it’s their own. Because, in some meaningful way, it is.

That’s worth more than any marketing budget trying to recreate the reach and trust they’ve already earned.

Get this right, and you gain deeper commitment, access to the creator’s real expertise, and a partner invested in the project’s success long after their contractual deliverable.

Get it wrong, and you risk buying the creator’s face while leaving their audience insight, creative instincts, and entrepreneurial energy outside the room.

The Translators

This is part of why people who have worked deeply in both systems can be particularly useful right now.

It’s something we think about a lot at Second Rodeo, and something I’m learning from Scott Brown, who I consider an authority on the subject of how to translate between traditional production culture and digital-native production without assuming either side has a monopoly on the right answer.

But I don’t think translators are the permanent solution.

If this convergence keeps accelerating, eventually we all have to become a little more bilingual.

The questions I’m asking are: which parts of each system are essential, which are contextual, and which can evolve? Because it’s…

A Two-Way Street

There is plenty digital can learn here too.

Legacy production has decades of hard-won knowledge around development, collaboration, labor, safety, financing, legal structures, craft specialization, large-team coordination, and maintaining quality at scales many creators have never managed.

Those systems didn’t appear arbitrarily.

But creators may not automatically understand the reason behind a process developed for a very different production environment. And the same can be said the other way around.

We need to distinguish between a hard-won best practice and an inherited habit.

Digital shouldn’t reject structure simply because it came from legacy. Legacy shouldn’t reject a different process simply because it doesn’t look familiar.

Both sides should be able to ask the same question:

What problem is this solving?

If you understand this: you get to combine decades of institutional knowledge with the speed, feedback loops, audience intimacy, and adaptability of digital.

If you don’t: you risk importing the weaknesses of one system into the other while accidentally filtering out the strengths.

Bottom Line

The convergence isn’t a hostile takeover in either direction, and it isn’t something we can permanently hand off to a few translators fluent in both worlds.

It’s the blueprints of two machines that both work, meeting in the middle to build something new together.

If we can get better at seeing what each side actually brings to the table, the next generation of entertainment doesn’t have to choose between the two systems.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: The Bomar Brothers (Cult Of Vision)

Instagram: 171K Followers

Website

*We are expanding the OG: Approved section! We’ve decided to interview creators. To understand the many ways creators are pushing forward, we have to get under the hood with them one on one (or in this case one on two) and find out exactly what their goals are and how they plan to achieve them. So, without further adieu we are happy to present our first OG: Approved Interview…

When I discovered the Bomar Brothers, it wasn’t through traditional channels or a film festival. My algorithm blessed me with a video that many may misidentify as AI slop.

The title? Fluff Fiction. It’s a parody of Pulp Fiction cast entirely with Muppets. After some digging, I found that these videos were not just basic AI outputs by a couple AI whiz kids. They were marketing missiles built by two twentysomething filmmakers trying to get their names out there. When I eventually got the chance to speak to Grant and Dean, I felt like I was in the garage with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 70’s.

This story is about two young filmmakers working out how to break in. They haven’t yet, and that’s part of why it’s worth telling now. What follows is the tools they’re using and the way they read the landscape. For me, it’s just a hunch. But it feels like a new age of indie filmmaking, and the door is wider than people think.

The Bomars were homeschooled and started making shorts on their dad’s iPad at eight and ten. The family was the studio: parents producing and mentoring, kids directing. American Gothic got made in thirteen days when Grant was seventeen. The brothers are also master-rated chess players. Grant has two national titles.

The Account

Fluff Fiction drops the Muppets into the grimiest corner of nineties crime cinema, and by the brothers’ account the work has drawn notice from inside the films themselves, including a blessing from one of the actors they parody. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have second thoughts.

Grant answers with art history. Picasso could paint like an old master years before he broke a single rule. Warhol turned printmaking into mass production and called his studio the Factory. The point being that the greats learned the fundamentals, then used whatever was new. Their film heroes did the same thing.

To him, AI is what CGI was when George Lucas first bet on it.

You can take or leave the lineage they’re claiming. The operation underneath the account is harder to argue with.

A flagship episode is about twenty hours of work between two or three people. Grant handles the cut. He watches the source film, lays down the structure, then writes change notes for Dean. Dean builds whatever doesn’t exist yet. That part runs eight to twelve hours of rendering and editing, and when the tools can’t reach the image in his head, he sketches it himself or digs up references until they get there. Every episode gets a poster designed from scratch. And they release weekly, no matter what.

Grant and his father keep spreadsheets on every video. Skip rate, share rate, retention broken out second by second. It sounds like overkill until you remember studios pay testing houses real money for this. The Bomars get it off a puppet video, every week, and write it down.

A video with no visible seam gets watched two or three times before you realize it. The retention hack and the Pulp Fiction homage are the same edit.

The community work gets done by hand too. The brothers and their dad answer comments and DMs for hours a day. The account earns about enough from Meta’s monetization programs to cover the compute bill, and they keep it there on purpose. They’ll tell you the work is protected as transformative parody, that they’ve done their research. That’s their reading. The law around AI-generated derivative work hasn’t caught up far enough for anyone to check it, and they know it, which is part of why the account was never meant to be the business.

The Bomar Brothers Playbook

1. Borrow the Attention, Keep the Audience

Recognizable IP does the hook work for free. A stranger scrolling past needs no introduction when the characters show up already loved, and that buys the first three seconds, which on these platforms is most of the battle. Everything those seconds earn belongs to the Bomars, though, not the IP. The follows and DM relationships are theirs, and so are the commenters asking who’s playing which character next week. That community is the real asset, and they treat it like one. Nobody trying to scale a page efficiently would spend their hours the way these two do, and they know it. “We don’t use chatbots,” Grant says. “We write all of our followers directly.” It’s a family operation, too, and the brothers want that on the record.)

2. Every Video Is a Rep

The twenty hours an episode is doing double duty. The content is the visible half. The rest is school. Dean started out close to anti-AI and got fluent in months because the account forces daily reps in Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, and every model they can get their hands on. The spreadsheets do the same job for storytelling. Most filmmakers guess at where an audience checks out. These two get told, in numbers, after every post.

They’re explicit that this education is earmarked for the features.

3. Final Authorship

The tools flatten everyone to the same starting point. What separates you is whatever you learned before you touched them. The Bomars learned a lot. They can draw at near-realism. They direct actors through improv, Cassavetes-style. They design their own posters and know how to structure an edit. All of it shows up in the AI work. Shots get planned on paper first, sketched out or pulled from references. Characters carry over from episode to episode on purpose, like a cast. Environments get designed, not generated. Grant talks about the tools the way he talks about improv, throw out a broad idea and work with what comes back. With one rule he won’t bend on.

That’s the gap between what they make and what the feed is drowning in. It’s why their stuff gets mistaken for original work by people who should know better. I know because I sent it to one.

4. Catching the Big Fish

Lynch wrote films by collecting scene ideas on cards until a feature assembled itself. He called it catching the big fish. Grant treats it as an instruction manual.

Every video is a scene idea getting tested on a live audience. The account is the card stack, and the poll questions and comment threads do the job a development exec used to pretend to do.

5. The Fusion

There’s no plan here to do AI content until they’ve earned the right to make real films, then drop it at the door. Nothing gets abandoned.

Dean’s reference point is Bruce Lee. Jeet Kune Do took the useful piece of every fighting style and threw the rest away. And the test case is already running. They’re remastering American Gothic with AI-assisted color and VFX, and Korey Pereira, the Emmy-winning sound designer from Stranger Things, is polishing the audio for a fall festival re-release. A film shot the old way, proven at festivals, going back out on the circuit with the new tools worked in. The whole plan, sitting in one movie.

Mid-Game

Everything above describes a position, not a victory. To their credit, the brothers know the difference.

The audience has never been tested on a Bomar original. Everyone who follows Cult of Vision signed up for the parodies. The plan is to start slipping original work in between them, stuff with the same creative DNA, until the audience’s taste comes along for the ride. It’s sensible and completely unproven. Grant expects a slight hit when the original content starts arriving. Nobody knows yet if it stays slight.

The legal foundation is a good-faith reading of fair use in a territory where the law hasn’t finished forming. A platform policy change or a studio enforcement wave could take the account down tomorrow, and it wouldn’t matter how well they’d run it. They’ve built with that in mind. The account is skills and audience. The revenue was never the point. The risk is still sitting there either way.

And a following doesn’t pay for a movie, at least not yet. Watching Katarina is half shot and waiting on a grant decision.

Their answer to all of it is the chess. Grant plays in a school built around what’s called the imbalances, the slow accumulation of small advantages across the whole board.

That’s the company doctrine, stated as a game. The festival track, the audience, the tool mastery, the school, the producer relationships, the local ties to Texas classical musicians and the UT dance departments they make dance films for. No single file wins the game. They all just improve the position. Worst case, they keep growing the audience, keep sending shorts to festivals, keep their education going at UT, and wait.

The Way Forward

I asked them at the end what they’d say to the people watching from the sidelines. And there are a lot of them right now. Writers, directors, and actors with real credits who can’t get work. Film students staring at a pipeline that no longer leads anywhere in particular.

Grant’s answer starts with the obvious part, create constantly, then gets specific. Build your mastermind group. Find the people who think like you and work like you, and develop the goal together. The lone-genius thing is mostly a story people tell after the fact. The Bomars came with theirs built in. Two brothers, their dad producing, their mom in the mix. But the principle doesn’t require sharing a last name.

Dean’s answer is the one I keep thinking about.

None of it required permission, and almost none of it required money, which makes it the oldest tradition in independent film wearing new materials. Look at what’s lying around and build with it.

Does it work? Nobody knows yet, including them. But two brothers with half a feature in the can are playing the long game in public, and I plan on checking back in on the board.

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(You can still read it for free.)

If you didn’t notice, we recently—and without much fanfare—put up a paywall on Open Gardens.

Here’s what you should know:

Our weekly articles are still free. You can also read the previous three months of the archive for free.

Paid subscribers will get the complete archive and additional premium material as we start creating more. I’ve begun recording interviews on Riverside, and we’ll be publishing highlight clips on social. The interviews are the basis of many of my long-form articles, but the conversations themselves are often pretty interesting. Those go behind the paywall.

A paid subscription costs $8 a month or $80 a year.

I didn’t launch Open Gardens as a revenue stream. But doing this well costs money.

We want to record more interviews, produce more video, cover more events across the country—and eventually around the world—and continue expanding the group of people contributing to the publication.

Right now, I run Open Gardens at a deficit because this is, in the parlance of our time, top of funnel. The payoff is what I learn and what I can share with others and the community we are building.

Any money from subscriptions will go directly back into doing more of the work.

Because of where we’ve placed the paywall, Open Gardens is still essentially free. But if you get a lot out of the publication and can afford to support it, please become a paid subscriber.

And if you can’t afford it but want access to the archive and other paid material, just DM us. We’ll give you a subscription for free.

Really. Hit us up.

I launched Open Gardens a year and a half ago for three reasons.

First, I saw the convergence of the creator economy and legacy media coming, and I wanted to hold myself accountable for understanding it—for my own benefit and for the benefit of my company, 3Pas Studios.

Second, I wasn’t seeing enough reporting on these changes from the perspective of the people actually doing the work. Journalists provide enormous value, and I read just about everyone covering this space. But a peer-to-peer conversation is different.

Third, I realized that if I wanted to understand the creator economy, I needed to become a creator. Open Gardens became my induction into that world. Since we’ve launched multiple creator businesses with more on the way.

All three of those things paid off.

Here’s what I didn’t see coming.

I didn’t expect Open Gardens to become widely read by people across both legacy media and the creator economy.

I didn’t expect the convergence to happen so quickly—or for it to become one of the most talked-about subjects across both industries.

And I didn’t expect the publication to connect me with such an enormous network of smart, curious people on every side of this conversation.

I also didn’t fully appreciate that publishing a deep-dive article every week—while managing a team of three other writers and running a very active film and television company—would be a lotta work.

Duh.

Every week, as I face another deadline, I question whether I can keep doing this.

And every week I pull my shit together and get it done, usually while my family gets the brunt of my polishing an article over the weekend. , ,and face similar struggles with time.

And yet…

And yet it’s so worth it.

Open Gardens has become so integral to the evolution of my company that I can’t afford not to continue.

It has been the single best way for me to understand what is changing, where the opportunities are, and what all of this means for people who make a living creating content.

And, from what many readers tell me, it has become similarly useful to them.

Which brings us back to the paywall.

Truthfully, we turned on paid subscriptions because Ted Hope suggested it. Ted is—and has always been—the Patron Saint of Indie Filmmakers and a mentor to an army of people in this industry. When Ted offers advice, it’s generally wise to listen. He was the first to pay for a subscription (thanks Ted).

It also turns out that Substack was built to make money, and it favors Substackers willing to do the same.

The Venerated Algorithm giveth, and the Venerated Algorithm taketh away.

But the real reason to subscribe is simpler.

If Open Gardens helps you understand where this business is going, and you can afford to support the work, please subscribe.

Your subscription won’t determine whether somebody else gets to read Open Gardens.

It will help determine how much more of this work we can do.

Thanks to all who have supported our stack,

Substacker-in-Chief,

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Disney brings creator-made vertical video into Disney+, consumer brands push further into original entertainment, ReelShort is projected to cross $1 billion in annual revenue, and Snap draws a firmer line around fully AI-generated content. Then, we dig into Scott’s time on The Vertical Buzz, where he and Buzz took a deep dive into the vertical industry.

But first…

I’ve been thinking a lot about collaboration lately.

It’s a word that has always been at the heart of the creator economy. And really, it’s at the heart of every movie that’s ever been made.

But I think collaboration has a new importance right now, because the collaboration that matters most may be the one happening between two worlds.

Ben Odell has been documenting this “great convergence” incredibly well for quite some time. And as we prepare to see more companies enter digital, vertical, and the creator economy in new ways, I think it’s important that we approach those partnerships as true collaborations, with the staunch belief that both sides have something the other needs.

The best partnerships are the ones where each side brings something the other cannot. We can go so much farther together than we can alone.

So, to the legacy entertainment readers of this newsletter, I’d just offer a question to consider as you embark on these deals: Are the structures in place making it easy for creator-economy collaborators to bring all of their wisdom to the table? And is there anything holding you back from receiving it?

And to those of us in the creator economy: Are we entering these collaborations with the same openness? Are we ready to learn from the enormous body of craft, knowledge, and tradition that has been built by the American entertainment industry?

I believe the future is going to be forged on that common ground.

An extraordinary amount of innovation and knowledge has accumulated on both sides. In some ways, as much has changed in the last ten years as in the hundred before them.

So, to everyone making deals, building companies, creating shows, and trying to win in an uncertain future, I think it’s worth asking ourselves, myself included: Are we being the best collaborators we can possibly be? Across creative execution, business, strategy, and all the moments in between?

Because if the creator economy has taught me anything, it’s that the biggest winners are often the greatest collaborators.

All right, let’s get into it.

Disney and TikTok Bring Creator Videos Into Disney+

Disney and TikTok have struck a global deal giving participating creators access to assets from hundreds of Disney films and series. Opt-in fan videos will appear on TikTok and inside Disney+’s existing Verts feed, beginning with a U.S. pilot in the coming months.

For vertical, the bigger signal is that Disney is bringing creator-made content into its own streaming product, using social video to deepen fandom and drive discovery. Coming after its OpenAI agreement ended when Sora shut down, it also keeps human creators, rather than fully generated content, at the center of the experiment.

DoorDash Names WME Its Entertainment Agency of Record

DoorDash has hired WME to lead its entertainment marketing and advisory work as the delivery company expands its relationships across Hollywood.

It is another sign that consumer brands increasingly see entertainment as more than a sponsorship opportunity. Paired with Xfinity’s launch below, the move suggests original content and cultural partnerships are becoming a larger part of the brand-marketing toolkit.

ReelShort Forecast to Pass $1 Billion and Turn a Profit

Media Partners Asia forecasts that ReelShort will generate $1.05 billion in revenue in 2026, up 34 percent, while moving from an estimated $12 million loss in 2025 to roughly $40 million in net profit. The firm expects the wider microdrama market outside China to reach $3.6 billion this year and $9.5 billion by 2031.

These are projections, not audited results, but the proposed path to profitability matters: stronger franchises, cheaper subscriber acquisition through telecom partners, more direct billing, and faster creative testing. That is a shift from growth through paid acquisition toward retention, recognizable IP, and owned distribution.

Xfinity Builds a Vertical Reality Competition for College Creators

Xfinity’s Best in Class is a seven-episode reality competition made specifically for Instagram and TikTok. Hosted by Katie Feeney and produced by NBCUniversal’s Rock Studios, it follows six college creators competing for a six-figure Xfinity partnership.

The series is less a traditional campaign than an original entertainment format built around the product and released where its audience already spends time. It is a clear example of a non-entertainment brand using vertical storytelling as the marketing itself, rather than the material surrounding it.

Snap Removes Fully AI-Generated Videos From Spotlight Recommendations

Snap says wholly AI-generated videos are no longer eligible for recommendation on Spotlight. They can still be posted, while videos edited with Snapchat’s AI tools remain eligible and will carry transparency labels.

The distinction matters. Snap is not rejecting AI wholesale. It is drawing a line around fully generated volume inside its discovery system. That echoes YouTube’s push against low-quality, repetitive AI content, which we covered in July, and suggests platforms increasingly see mass-produced synthetic video as a recommendation-quality problem rather than a growth strategy.

Scott on The Vertical Buzz

This week, Scott joined Buzz Leer on The Vertical Buzz to talk about where vertical entertainment is headed and what the industry can learn from the creator economy.

Buzz is an actor, host, and vertical veteran who has worked across dozens of productions, and he’s built The Vertical Buzz into a great forum for the people shaping the space. Huge thanks to Buzz for having us.

You can watch the full interview here. Below are a few highlights that capture a lot of what we believe about the space, with takeaways for filmmakers and dealmakers alike.

Why Now?

Scott breaks down why he believes the scripted digital boom is happening now, using Dhar Mann as a case study. He also talks creative ambition, social platforms as a meritocracy for scripted content, and why sometimes the best creative move is taking a break.

The People Behind the Work

Scott talks about how much of his success comes from finding the right collaborators and empowering them. He and Buzz dig into directing actors and crews, boldness, pacing, and why retention ultimately comes down to creating a promise the audience wants fulfilled.

Storytelling Is a Technology

Scott gets into his love of Sidney Lumet, book recommendations, and his directing prep process. He also explores the difference between legacy and digital storytelling, breaks down a Project Hail Mary retention mechanism (spoilers!), and shares what he sees as the biggest opportunity in vertical today.

Thanks again to Buzz for having us. You can find more from The Vertical Buzz here, follow Buzz on Instagram and LinkedIn, or watch the full conversation on YouTube.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Michael Somerville

Instagram: 297K Followers

Youtube: 2.6K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 94K Followers

Who Is Michael Somerville?

Michael Somerville was making sketches for YouTube eighteen years ago, back when most comedians used the site to upload shaky clips from the back of a comedy club.

He opened his channel in 2006. By 2008, he was starring in two original web shows, Lunch Break with Somerville and Love, Somerville. He was already writing recurring formats for the internet before anyone had settled on what web comedy was supposed to look like.

Somerville started stand-up on a dare while attending Notre Dame. After graduation, he briefly worked in advertising before moving to New York and pursuing comedy full time. His career includes four appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, several albums, years of touring, and more than 100 million views across his digital shorts.

Somerville releases three scripted sketch series each week on Instagram.

The Monday bar sketches pair Somerville with Adam Ferrara. The bar gives them a reason to keep meeting, while Ferrara and Somerville find a new way to irritate each other every Monday. Ferrara is not dropping in for a cameo. He is part of the series, and the videos rely on the rhythm between the pair.

Wednesday brings relationship sketches. Somerville has been writing about men, women, dating, and marriage for most of his career, but the newer videos come from a different stage of life. The fights are smaller, the history is longer, and both people usually know exactly which nerve they are touching.

Friday belongs to the dad sketches. Somerville has spoken about raising children while continuing to tour, and the videos stay close to the daily confusion of parenting. His dads want to look prepared, maintain authority, and get through a normal afternoon without exposing how much they are improvising.

The schedule keeps the page from feeling like a pile of unrelated reels. Monday has Ferrara at the bar, Wednesday returns to couples, and Friday goes back to the dads. He does not need one recurring character to connect the videos. The bar, relationship, and dad sketches all sound like him.

The habit goes back to Lunch Break with Somerville and Love, Somerville. Those early shows gave his comedy a form beyond the stage. Instagram offers a different screen and a faster release schedule, but Somerville is still writing recurring shows for an audience watching online.

Three Things We Love About Michael Somerville

He was making web shows before there was a playbook: Somerville was creating original online comedy in 2008, long before social video became an expected part of a comedian’s career. He kept working in the form while the platforms caught up.

The week has a real schedule: Bar sketches arrive Monday, relationship sketches Wednesday, and dad sketches Friday. Each series has its own subject, while Somerville’s point of view holds the page together.

He did not freeze the act in his thirties: The relationship jokes grew into marriage jokes, and fatherhood gave him an entirely new weekly series. Somerville kept the same comic voice without pretending his life had stayed the same.

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An Open Gardens reader recently asked me the question I hear everywhere in legacy media: producers have spent their careers getting paid to make things — fees up front, backend if you’re lucky. The creator economy asks the opposite of you: fund it yourself, build it in public, and wait years for real revenue. How does a career producer survive that transition?

This week, I’m writing about Adam Neuhaus, a high-level nonfiction producer and former executive who isn’t just asking that question. He’s actively building a playbook to answer it.

Adam started in the William Morris mailroom in New York, then moved through Original Media and RadicalMedia, working on shows including Dual Survival, Swamp People, and BBQ Pitmasters. He later spent more than seven years at ESPN Films and 30 for 30, where he helped launch the 30 for 30 podcast series and worked on films including Be Water, The American Gladiators Documentary, and Dream On. A premium executive making premium content during peak TV.

He’s also an Open Gardens reader, which is how we connected. After I wrote about Teton Ridge and what I call OpenVerses—loose affiliations of people around a shared interest that can be corralled into vertical businesses—he reached out on LinkedIn: Hey, I’m actually building what you call an OpenVerse. Would love to chat.

So we did. Then we talked some more. The more we talked, the clearer it became that what Adam was building spoke directly to that reader’s question—and to how I’m thinking about my own company and the bridge between legacy media and creators.

I love this guy: how he thinks, how proactive and strategic he is, and what a mensch he is. That menschy-ness may be part of why he succeeds.

If you want inspiration, take a big hit of Adam Neuhaus. He’ll get you buzzed with excitement about the future of media.

First, Don’t Quit Your Day Job (Seriously — It’s the Strategy)

Before I get into the very distinct creator-legacy convergence businesses Adam is building — and I want to discuss each in detail — I want to lay out one of the foundational principles for producers leaning into the creator economy.

The thing you are great at, the way Adam is great at producing nonfiction series and films, you don’t stop doing it. First of all, you need the revenue coming in. And yes, it’s not what it was during the streaming wars, but if you’re good at what you do, you can still make money. And that’s going to keep the lights on while you build the next business.

Adam still develops and pitches the traditional way, because that’s who he is. But listen to how deliberately he manages it:

Because buyers are buying less, that precision is vital: it opens up time to build other things. The commissions that once sustained a whole class of producers have thinned dramatically—the festival acquisition market has cratered (Sundance 2023 famously produced zero U.S. Documentary Competition sales), Participant shut its doors after twenty years, and the streamers have pulled way back on third-party buying. Adam saw it in real time:

At 3Pas, we’re trying a version of the same thing: using the traditional business we know to fund a digital division that acts as the company’s spine, then making sure each legacy project is wired into communities. (I keep promising to write more about it, and I will. It’s a work in progress, and I’m waiting for the right moment.) When I described the approach to Adam, he jumped in:

I appreciated that honesty. Neither of us has fully cracked it. That’s kind of the point — this is a piece about building in public, and building in public means you gotta show the scaffolding…

Hello OpenVerse, Hello Puzzlers

OpenVerses are what connected Adam and me. When he read my pieces, he recognized that I had put a name to something he was already seeing—and beginning to build. His recognition helped propel him in a new direction. Puzzles were his OpenVerse, and the vertical he and his partners are building is called Hello, Puzzlers.

When Adam left ESPN, most of his slate was exactly what you’d expect from a premium non-fiction guy — series, docs, big IP. But one project put him immediately into creator-led territory. He partnered with author A.J. Jacobs, whose book The Puzzler he loved, and quickly sold a puzzle podcast to iHeart. And then came the realization:

Puzzles are precisely the kind of category that legacy content models struggle to serve. They’re too niche for a studio or streamer to build a business around—which is what makes them a ripe OpenVerse. The New York Times owns puzzle games as products, but nobody owns puzzle culture. From day one, Adam and his partners treated that opportunity as a company, not a show:

They also had to do it the way every creator does—through what serial creator-entrepreneur and creator manager Zack Honarvar calls “bootstrap VC”, i.e., funding your own seed round. “Building a brand without any money, if you talk to any creator, it is a challenging situation,” Adam told me. The iHeart deal covered a couple of full seasons, and the journey since has been a crash course in creator economics. They launched as a daily show:

After two years they decided to take the show independent — and credit to iHeart, who “very graciously gave us back our feed.” Then came the platform build-out, right as the industry decided every podcast needed to be a video podcast:

Three years in, here’s where the flywheel stands:

More than 670 episodes of podcasting at the time of this interview, a Patreon, a YouTube channel with nearly 100 episodes, a TikTok channel, live events — and their first physical card game arriving in September.

Full disclosure: as I’m an idiot and not a real journalist, I hadn’t watched or listened to the podcast before I spoke to Adam. But I did watch a few episodes on YouTube afterward. First I’ll say A.J. Jacobs is a perfect host — fun, authentic, smart, family friendly, and he knows he’s not curing cancer with his content, which is exactly the right tone for a platform that wants puzzlers. I watched Michael Ian Black, a heady comedian who clearly loves this stuff because he nailed so many of the questions. Fun to watch, except that it made me feel intellectually inferior to everyone on the show. While the podcast is doing respectable numbers, the YouTube channel is still in its early phase. But the content is great, and focused clearly on the niche.

Amongst their portfolio for the vertical, they tested live. “We saw live puzzling as a very interesting two-word phrase that we didn’t see a lot in the marketplace,” Adam said. “We filled rooms and we learned a lot along the way. I wouldn’t say it jumped up, but we saw that it traveled.” That word — traveled — is clutch to building any niche. In my own exploration of how to value communities, I wrote an article called the Six Dimensions Test about the six ways to analyze a community’s worth, and live events is one of them. So I love that Adam and his partners were kicking the tires early, testing the community’s portability and seeing IRL who these people actually are.

And then there’s booking talent for the show, which tells you everything about how niches work:

Passionate groups of people self-activate inside a niche world they love. The celebrities have fun, they come back, and the flywheel gets a push.

Commerce as a Community Test

One obvious measure of a community’s commercial potential is whether people will buy a product. In September, Adam and his team will test that with their first physical one: Earbus, a card game featuring 900 audio rebuses.

Earbus is a portmanteau of “ear” and “rebus.” An audio rebus is a word or phrase spoken in a particular way that forms a clue—“trouble, trouble,” for example, becomes “double trouble.” The idea grew directly out of a problem they had to solve for the podcast: How do you make a visual puzzle work in a medium where nobody can see it?

“I’ll say a word in a particular way and it will be a full phrase… [like Trouble-trouble]… We have 900 of those cards and clues. And we created a kind of Cards Against Humanity type thing. We partnered with an independent game studio who we’re splitting the revenue of the game with—not the IP.”

The podcast’s audio format forced them to think about puzzling in an audio format. Now they’re turning that format into a physical card game. They’ll split the revenue with the game studio that is helping bring it to market, but Adam and his partners will retain ownership of the IP—a distinction someone with twenty years of rights negotiations knows matters.

Then Adam said something that captures the whole mindset of using content to build a top-of-funnel while staying loose about where it might lead:

Yep, that’s the top-of-funnel mentality that all of us legacy knuckleheads need to get straight. Content creates the community, but the business is probably downstream—and you never know what it’ll be.

Maybe the Hello Puzzlers buy up an escape room company. Or make puzzle games for phones. Or maybe it’s a subscription business where you get a different physical game each month. Who knows? No one, actually—which is why you have to bootstrap these businesses long enough to prove the model. Then you can bring in financing if you need to.

Regardless of whether this particular niche ever gets the traction they hope for, he’s getting his 10,000 hours in audience-building. “It gave me the most cred,” he told me, “because I was able to say, I’m building this audience. And it is hard to build an audience… I have more respect for people who really gather people and build it and then monetize it.” That skill set compounds. It travels to the next niche, and the one after that, whether or not puzzles becomes the big one.

The Next M&A Gold Rush Is Community

Why does any of this matter beyond the joy of making things? Because of where Adam is convinced the market is going:

He’s so right. This is going to be the next frontier of M&A. It’s been happening quietly for a while, but community is becoming one of the strongest moats for building media companies that sell at a multiple. It lines up exactly with what Chris Erwin of RockWater told me when I wrote about how creator businesses actually get valued: the conversation has shifted from growth at all costs to durable businesses — profitability, IP ownership, revenue diversification, defensible moats.

In Chris’s framing, media is no longer the end product; it’s the acquisition channel, and community sits at the center. A company like Hello Puzzlers, with owned IP, diversified revenue, and a real community around it, is being built to be exactly what those buyers will be shopping for.

The Hot List — the Genius of the System

Now for the second business, which started with failure. After leaving ESPN, Adam worked in a first-look deal with a bigger producer who wanted sports expertise, and built a slate he believed in completely. And then:

So he took the idea to his LinkedIn community, writing that he had taken out 15 projects he believed in and sold none of them—and that other producers must be sitting on similarly strong unsold slates. He proposed using the Black List as a model for nonfiction.

He wasn’t announcing a company. He was airing his own slate’s failure in public and asking whether anyone else wanted to do something about it. The post went “mini viral” on LinkedIn.

People kept asking, “Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna be the one to put this together?” Because his own projects were having a hard time selling, he said yes and “immediately gathered a group of 20 volunteers on a Zoom call”:

He expected early-career filmmakers. “Instead, we got everybody. Emmy winners, Oscar winners, and in 30 days we had gotten 640 submissions.” They ran a film-festival-style review process, selected 23 projects, and published a public deck — with the contact information of every filmmaker, plus all their sizzle reels and pitch decks in one place. “In my twenty-plus years in the industry, I’ve never seen this type of resource out there,” Adam said. Filmmakers could be contacted directly. No toll booth. No gatekeeping.

And the spotlight worked. “We had films premiere at Telluride, premiere at South by, premiere at Sheffield. The one podcast we selected won a Peabody Award.” Some of those projects were already on their way — Adam is quick to say The Hot List was sometimes just another voice on the bandwagon — but the momentum was real, and so was the ethos behind it: don’t ghost anybody, get back to people, be easy to reach.

Which brings me to the thing I find most important about how Adam thinks. He wasn’t building a business. He was building a community, and the business emerged from it. Hello, Puzzlers is a B to C community. Hot list is a B to B community. The smartest move in my opinion is what he did with the 600-plus projects that didn’t make the list:

They called it the Fresh Eyes Initiative, and let’s be clear about the value here — these filmmakers were getting an hour with someone as smart and experienced as Adam Neuhaus, for free, at exactly the moment they’d normally be getting a form rejection. And all those conversations put his team in the middle of every trend line moving through the nonfiction space.

The goodwill turned into a business almost by accident — though of course serendipity and relationships are so often how brand deals actually happen. A former ESPN colleague, Ryan Spoon, is at Yahoo. During a catch-up call, Adam mentioned what he was seeing, including that documentary shorts felt like a wildly undervalued category. Yahoo hadn’t been doing much original content, and had no internal infrastructure to run an open call. So Ryan proposed one: Hot List runs the submissions and the curation, Yahoo licenses and distributes 20 shorts.

The films roll out at the end of August on Yahoo’s YouTube across sports, business, arts, and science and nature — plus a live activation at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey.

And notice what happened structurally: a brand-new distributor entered the documentary space because someone built the connective tissue that let them. Adam has been telling the documentary world that the Hot List’s goal isn’t just more money into the space, but new pathways — new partners, new distributors, new people who haven’t been doing this.

And once again, they turned rejection into community. Filmmakers whose shorts weren’t selected received a redirection email with six free webinars, created with organizations that support filmmakers—Seed&Spark, Kinema, Show&Tell, and Picture Motion:

So smart.

This is how you build a lasting community: give people something without expecting anything in return. What comes back is loyalty and a desire to strengthen the Hot List and who knows what down the line... And, for most people—especially those working in a cutthroat business—it simply feels good to help.

Submissions for the 2026 Hot List — works in progress — are open now. They’re anticipating several thousand submissions this time.

From here the business is branching in ways that all flow from the same funnel.

They’re going to brands in categories where submissions run deep, offering to curate slates of finished, independently made shorts — “we can bring you 10, 20, 30 amazing documentary shorts… in your topic, in your theme… You can roll these out in 30 days. And by the way, we’ll charge you a lot less.”

The brand knows exactly what it’s buying before it writes the check, which solves branded content’s oldest problem. And they’re raising a small fund to make bets on documentaries whose subjects could become real communities — funnels to flywheels — with shared resources on marketing and community building.

As Adam put it, the goal is to help “filmmakers build community before their projects are done,” because most “don’t start marketing until their film is done, which is the most expensive marketing dollars you could spend.”

Build your own email list early, and “you could bring those lists with you the rest of your career.” Filmmaker sustainability, built the creator way.

The Tarzan Effect

Take a step back and the two businesses share a similar diagnosis. Adam has a name for the disease they’re both treating:

Every legacy producer has swung on those vines. What Adam realized is that with one-off projects, you work incredibly hard—and then it all abruptly ends. Why can’t all that effort sustain an ongoing business? It takes the same amount of work to get started.

For me the wake up call was Acapulco on Apple and De Viaje con los Derbez on Amazon— two shows I produced, both extremely well supported by their platforms, no complaints there, but missing the connective tissue between seasons to keep the superfans engaged. And on both there were superfans who were begging for more content and continuity. That really started to bother me and was part of what pushed me to think about community building not just content creation.

Legacy just isn’t built for that idea.

Meanwhile, I was watching creators work in almost the opposite way: they started with the community and used content as one of many ways to keep it active. Legacy content could build communities too—we just weren’t always aware of what we had created, much less organized to sustain it. That gap really started to bother me and pushed me to think about community building, not just content creation.

Adam saw the same thing through the lens of nonfiction: vine to vine, project to project, instead of building around one community and letting its value compound over time. Building that community is much harder at the start, but far more valuable in the long run.

And the Hot List shows what’s on the other side of the swing — “now I sit at the top of a funnel of hopefully several thousand ideas,” projects that can be looked at not just as documentaries but as worlds, businesses, creator-led scenarios.

How Adam’s Legacy Brain Prepares for a Creator-Convergence Future

One of the things I love about Adam is how strategic he is. He’s thinking about the Puzzlers business as a 15-year business. Sure, it might end up being an exit in three or five years — but the founder mindset of building for the long term keeps you focused on value rather than quick exits, which, if you’re lucky, is exactly how you end up exiting well, quickly or otherwise.

He’s organized his whole working life around four categories, chosen so that expertise and interest compound instead of evaporating between projects:

He’s also hunting for worlds the way he used to hunt for reality-show access, but with a different endgame — “worlds that are maybe passed by, where we can build different pieces of businesses that make sense for that business.” A gardening documentary that leads to a seed business or a shovels business, like Epic Gardening. “There are lots of those,” he says, “not even in the creator economy yet — of experts.”

Niches Don’t Necessarily Need to Be Undiscovered

A word about the wine lane.

Adam talks a lot about finding underexploited niches. Wine is not one of them. It’s a packed category, with experts and creators everywhere. And yet his wife, Isabel Neuhaus, shows why that doesn’t necessarily matter.

Isabel writes a Substack called Wine Ideas, which includes essays and videos. I read a few posts and watched a few of the videos. I can’t claim any deep knowledge of wine, but she clearly knows her stuff—and, just as importantly, she has a specific voice. She’s charismatic. And as much as she knows, she doesn’t sound like a know-it-all.

That’s how even crowded niches work. Wine drinkers aren’t looking for the one person who owns wine. They’re looking for someone they trust, whose voice and sensibility resonate with them and whose expertise is expressed in a way they understand.

A niche can be owned by many people. You don’t need to own wine; you need to build a meaningful community within it. From there, you can expand into live events, curated trips, subscriptions, or a wine club—and monetize the hell out of it. Isabel doesn’t need 20 million followers. A couple hundred thousand engaged ones could create a great business. It will be interesting to see how she and Adam lean into it.

The Future of Storytelling: Stop Treating the Feature as the Finish Line

Toward the end of our conversation, we got into the part of this transition that filmmakers resist most: the idea that the film is no longer the whole product. The stats have been telling us this for a while—Gen Z discovers 60 percent of the TV and film it watches through social media, and that share keeps climbing. Which means you can’t think only about the movie anymore. There are all these surfaces where people consume, and the idea you’re making has to live across them—one of those surfaces happens to be a feature film. Adam has taken heat for saying this out loud:

Here’s what I’d add, as someone who has made a lot of independent films: the greatest frustration was always the helplessness after the film was done — a distributor cutting the content, pushing it out however they wanted, a publicist, and that was the extent of your control. If you look at the marketing as a creative extension of the work, it lets you create more and gives you far more control over how your thing enters the world. People who didn’t grow up in the pre-social system don’t understand how many problems came with it.

Adam also punctures the prestige illusion in a way I loved:

Against that, here’s where he sees the real energy:

And then the line that could be the thesis of this whole piece:

I asked him to check my bias on one more thing — my belief that in a world flooding with AI-generated content, real stories about real people become more valuable, not less. His answer is a model for how to hold that position without sounding like a Luddite:

There’s no fear in that comment. The people who win aren’t afraid of the future—or at least they don’t let fear drive their decisions.

And the contraction that started this whole story? He sees the opening inside it:

Karmic Kickbacks

One last thing, to bring this full circle. Adam first reached out to me with no agenda. We had a conversation. Then more conversations. Along the way, a very high-level documentary producer he knew was working on an intereating piece of IP that happened to be right in my lane—and he sent them my way. We decided to collaborate. We’re moving along—early days—but I love the idea, and I love that it was simply a product of this connection. No deal memo, no agenda, no ask.

Adam thinks about this stuff deliberately: “I think a lot about how do we create circular economies… where we’re passing stuff among people.”

It sounds hokey, but it isn’t. The goodwill you put out into this ecosystem comes back, in weird ways, on its own schedule.

It built Hello Puzzlers’ guest list. It built the Hot List. It turned a rejection email into the best one anyone ever got. And it’s the answer, or at least the beginning of one, to the reader question that opened this piece: the model that bridges the gap is the one Adam is building in public — keep the craft, keep the revenue, pick your categories, own a piece of what you make, and treat the community as a partner. The community provides.

Adam is the first to say he hasn’t figured it out. But he has the thing that makes me believe he will: the right mindset. That’s why I write about people like him—and why the rest of us can learn from what he’s building.

I did.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, TikTok tests the limits of microdrama pricing, HBO Max brings AI-assisted vertical discovery into its mobile app, and a new sports company asks what happens when the competition itself is built for the feed. Then, we dig into new audience data from HOLYWATER TECH and Owl & Co, and what it suggests about a category whose viewer profile is still changing in real time.

But first…

This was a wild week in vertical behind the scenes at Second Rodeo, but we still want to bring something valuable to your inbox. In the spirit of brevity being an important value, a Haiku:

The Audience Longs

For Moments They Won’t Forget

And a Secret Depth

And I still believe this is true.

Alright, let’s get into it!

TikTok Quietly Tests a $20-a-Week Microdrama App

TikTok has been running a paid microdrama app called LimeShorts in the U.S. since March. The app mirrors the freemium model of category leaders ReelShort and DramaBox: free opening episodes, followed by a paywall. Full access currently costs $19.99 a week or $200 a year, while digital coin packages range from $5 for 500 coins to $70 for 8,500. LimeShorts replaced ByteDance’s earlier fiction-reading app, Mytopia.

Its catalog currently comes entirely from third-party partners, and a TikTok spokesperson said pricing may still change as the company tests different options. The app sits alongside TikTok’s free PineDrama app and a dedicated microdrama feed being tested inside the main TikTok app.

This means TikTok is now running free, freemium, and premium experiments in the format simultaneously. The U.S. microdrama industry generated roughly $1.4 billion in 2025, according to consulting firm Owl & Co, and TikTok’s multi-tier approach reads as an attempt to find out which price point that audience will actually bear.

HBO Max Dips a Toe Into Vertical, Powered by AI

As part of two new mobile discovery features, HBO Max rolled out a vertical, scrollable feed called HBO Max Shorts this week.

The feed surfaces trailers, bonus material, and iconic or memorable scenes from the platform’s library to help users discover something to watch. It is currently being tested with select iOS users in the U.S.

Crucially, these are not original vertical dramas. The clips are designed to move viewers toward the full-length titles they came from, a discovery strategy Netflix is also using with its Clips feed.

The clips are generated with help from an in-house AI tool that uses scene-level metadata to comb through thousands of hours of programming and suggest potentially high-impact moments. Human editors then decide which scenes to use and how to verticalize them.

World 1 Wants to Build “Microsports” for the Feed

World 1, a sports-entertainment company backed by Mark Cuban and built with a founding group that includes ten Olympic medalists, has unveiled Microsports: entirely original athletic competitions where world titles can be won or lost in roughly 30 seconds, designed specifically for vertical video.

CEO Brett Morris argues that the modern sports industry was built around television, even as audiences increasingly moved toward their phones. Rather than adapting legacy competitions into shorter clips, World 1 is attempting to build a new category of sports engineered for the feed from the beginning.

The company is starting with two competitions, Fastest and Strongest, with plans to develop more.

The Verge: Vertical Video Is Eating Every Platform

In a column tying together many of the week’s threads, The Verge argues that TikTok’s vertical format is spreading across YouTube, Instagram, streaming services, and nearly every other major media platform as their products converge around mobile-first viewing.

It is the connective thesis behind everything else in this roundup. HBO Max is reformatting its library into scroll-friendly clips. A sports startup is engineering entire competitions for the feed. TikTok is testing multiple ways to package and monetize serialized vertical storytelling.

The underlying format war may already have been decided. What remains is the fight over who owns the audience once they are there.

The Category Is Still Being Built: What HOLYWATER’s Data Actually Tells Us

A Vertical Bloom deep dive into The State of Microdrama 2026, shared with us by HOLYWATER TECH.

HOLYWATER TECH, the company behind live-action app My Drama and AI-generated app My Muse, passed us a copy of The State of Microdrama 2026, a joint report with Owl & Co.

The report combines four data sources: internal product data from My Drama and My Muse, a self-selected in-app survey of 2,737 self-identified U.S. microdrama fans reached through My Drama, and a separate self-selected My Muse survey with 34,406 responses. The reporting windows vary by dataset. My Muse product data generally covers December 2025 through May 2026, while some of the My Drama demographic data extends back to Q2 2024.

It was prepared for the Vertical Media Summit 2026 before HOLYWATER decided to release it publicly, with Owl & Co founder Hernan Lopez writing the foreword.

Several outlets have already run through the top-line findings, but we wanted to focus on the numbers we have kept coming back to, and what they might mean beyond the report itself.

1. The Audience Isn’t Settled Yet. Not Really.

The data: Roughly 65% of the My Drama users surveyed have been watching microdrama for less than a year. Break that down further: 31% started less than three months ago, another 35% started three to twelve months ago, and only 12% have been watching for more than two years.

By the report’s own framing, the category is “still being formed.”

That might be a throwaway statistic if new viewers behaved like new viewers usually do: tentatively, at low intensity, and with a high likelihood of drifting away. The current users represented here do not. Eighty-two percent of the under-three-month cohort already opens My Drama daily, the same rate as viewers who have been around for two years.

It is the same pattern showing up elsewhere in the report. Men went from 1.1% to 30.3% of My Drama’s monthly active users with known gender in seven quarters, a 28-fold increase. The share represented by viewers aged 22 to 27 among known-age monthly active users more than tripled in five quarters.

Among the current users captured in this report, later arrivals are not behaving like tourists.

Our take: This is the single most important finding in the report because it reframes what “the microdrama audience” even means.

There is no stable, legible microdrama viewer to design around yet. There is a viewer profile from 2024, women aged 35 to 54 watching at night, that the report itself describes as a caricature. Underneath it is a fast-moving population that increasingly does not look like that.

Any platform, studio, or brand treating today’s engagement data as a fixed target may be optimizing for a group that could represent a much smaller portion of the audience a year from now.

The more useful implication is about where the immediate growth opportunity sits. The report does not prove that retention is solved. It surveys current My Drama users rather than tracking everyone who has ever tried the category and churned, and a voluntary in-app survey is naturally more likely to capture engaged viewers.

It does, however, suggest that frequent use can form quickly among people who make it into the app. Eighty-two percent of users who began watching microdrama within the previous three months already open My Drama daily.

That should push the industry to think just as seriously about sampling as optimization: getting unfamiliar audiences, including men, older Gen Z viewers, and non-romance audiences, to try the format in the first place.

The platforms that win the next eighteen months may be the ones that expand who samples microdrama, not only the ones that optimize for the people already watching.

2. The Audience Peaks on Sunday Night

The data: The highest-activity window on My Drama is Sunday between 8 and 10 p.m. local time. The lowest activity occurs on weekday mornings between 3 and 9 a.m.

Our take: This is our inference, not the report’s.

It is hard not to notice that My Drama’s highest-activity window overlaps with the Sunday-evening slot legacy television spent decades cultivating for appointment viewing.

The technology and episode lengths have changed, but the psychology may not have. Sunday evening remains a natural period for escapism before the workweek begins, whether that means settling in for a prestige drama or binge-scrolling an entire vertical series in bed.

It is a useful reminder that this audience may not be inventing entirely new viewing behavior. It could be bringing very old habits into a new format.

3. Adapted IP Is the Strongest Lever in the Report, With One Real Asterisk

The data: Forty-one percent of respondents ranked “stories adapted from books, films, or shows you already know” first among four things that would get them to watch more.

That placed adapted IP ahead of underserved genres, famous actors, and knowing that friends are watching.

The report calls it “the single most powerful lever for the audience overall.”

The asterisk is that, within the survey’s male subgroup, adapted IP mattered at roughly half the average rate. It is one major lever where a rapidly growing part of the audience diverges sharply from the existing base.

Our take: This validates a trend we have already been covering.

WWE’s ReelShort collaboration and the vertical reformat of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger are not simply opportunistic one-offs. They are recent examples of companies testing whether recognition can reduce the friction of choosing what to watch inside an unfamiliar format.

The report supports adapted IP as a lever for getting existing My Drama users to watch more. microdrama.

Expect the IP-licensing conversation in vertical to accelerate. Familiar worlds, characters, books, films, and entertainment brands give audiences a trusted entry point into additional stories.

But the male-audience finding is an important qualification. Adapted IP may be the strongest overall lever without being the universal answer.

The category is growing, but it is not settled. The audience is becoming habitual before it becomes predictable. The opportunity is not simply to serve the microdrama viewer better.

It is to help discover who that viewer could be.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

The Peacock x YouTube Bundle

In what some are calling a landmark deal, YouTube has agreed to include Peacock in its premium subscription tier.

There’s a few ways to look at this.

Doug Shapiro frames the deal primarily as a bet on advertising for NBCU. Peacock currently pulls in around $8 a month from subscription fees and $5 from ad revenue per user. Taking on the cannibalization risk to subscription income only makes sense if you believe advertising, along with lower marketing costs and reduced churn, can more than fill that gap.

But from the YouTube side, Samir Chaudry (from Colin & Samir), argues that although YouTube has over 125 million Music and Premium subscribers, it has almost nothing in the way of original programming sitting behind that paywall.

Samir’s take goes as follows:

Last quarter, Google’s subscriptions revenue grew 15% while YouTube ad revenue grew 13%, meaning subscriptions are now outpacing ads, and subscriptions only hold if you give people a reason to stick around.

Netflix has spent the past year signing YouTube talent. YouTube is not going to outbid Netflix for those creators. As Samir says, it does not need to.

What it can offer instead that Netflix cannot is a subscription-funded tier on the platform where a creator’s audience already lives. The path back to original programming is not rebuilding YouTube Originals as some have proposed, but rather financing arrangements with partners like NBCU, where creator-led shows can sit behind the Premium paywall without YouTube having to take on the studio risk or the branding.

Samir’s bet is that YouTube eventually consolidates into a single app covering live TV, a Premium tier with exclusive and licensed programming, and the classic ad-supported experience everyone currently has. One ecosystem, three tiers, the whole consumer in one place.

Instagram’s Scripted TV Boom

It seems that the new indie pathway to finding audience first and nailing that streamer deal is to go through IG first.

Natalie Jarvey recently posted a great story about the Instagram TV boom.

The example she highlights is pretty great:

Aaron Karo and Michael Doneger had multiple projects stuck in TV development, until they decided to stop waiting. Their new show idea was a buddy comedy about a lonely guy who builds a robot best friend, and rather than taking Friend Material around Hollywood, they made it themselves. With a thousand dollars, a camera Doneger already owned, and a few friends willing to help. Twelve episodes, posted straight to Instagram.

Less than three months later, the show has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times, and brands have already reached out about backing a second season. The goal is still to adapt the three-minute episodes into a half-hour series for a streamer or network, but the point is one we’ve talked about for a while here: that they no longer need permission from an executive to prove the concept works. As Karo puts it, when they sit down with producers now, they can show exactly how many people have already watched.

Natalie explores if this is becoming a pattern. She spoke to writer-producer Jon Stahl, who has been tracking the growth of vertically-shot scripted comedies and recently counted more than two dozen, with the number still climbing. Brooklyn Coffee Shop, the epitome of IG TV, has been running for three years and built a real audience around its workplace humor.

There’s more she brings up.

But the lesson is that these shows occupy their own corner, distinct from microdramas, even though they share the vertical format. They are closer in spirit to indie film than to the platform-produced, algorithm-dictated micro-series model.

As legacy media continues to de-risk, it’ll be interesting to see whether shows emanating from Instagram rather than YouTube (like the recent horror hits) will take off.

HBO Goes… Vertical?

HBO just announced HBO Max Shorts, a feature that drops users into a vertical, scrollable feed of clips and scenes pulled from the existing HBO Max library. It’s designed to help people find something to watch rather than spend ten minutes staring at the homepage.

Users who find something they like can then tap through to the full show or film, add it to their list, or simply keep scrolling.

Now, this is not original content (at least not yet?). These clips are existing programming reformatted into vertical clips, processed through an in-house AI tool that uses scene-level metadata to identify high-impact moments, with human editors involved in the final selection.

Netflix is doing something similar with its own short-form clips feature.

The question here is whether this is simply surface-level adapting that ultimately doesn’t move the needle in the great convergence.

Sure, this might be a better way to figure out what you want to watch, but wouldn’t this also be a better way to figure out what HBO wants to make?

Commissioning lower-cost new content for this format and analyzing data to see what works to then scale it up to full TV shows seems like sensible logic. But perhaps trying to compete with TikTok on its own terms is not worth the fight.

Either way, moves like this are worth keeping an eye on.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"If I read or hear one more report about how “Backrooms” and “Obsession” have changed Hollywood forever, or how YouTube is the new New Hollywood (or the new Sundance), I’m going to gag."

— Film programmer and journalist Anthony Kaufman

Love grounding takes like these. It’s worth reading Anthony’s full argument, which includes sobering stats such as the discovery rate on YouTube being 0.000005%.

His full post here.

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Timothy Thatcher

Instagram: 82.4K Followers

Youtube: 38.5K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 126.4K Followers

Who Is Timothy Thatcher?

Timothy Thatcher is a Minnesota comic working across stand-up, short films, and online sketch.

His YouTube bio reads, “Sketch comedy from my buddies and I,” and the channel follows through on it. Thatcher works with a regular group of performers instead of playing every role himself. He leaves room for someone else to interrupt him, undercut the scene, or land the final joke.

His sketches pull from work, dating, friendship, and people lying to save themselves from minor embarrassment. Nobody needs an elaborate costume or a long introduction. The characters usually make their problems worse by talking longer than they should.

Thatcher performs stand-up across the West Coast, but his videos are written as scenes rather than monologues broken into camera angles. The jokes pass between people. One character starts the problem, another misunderstands it, and someone in the background realizes how badly the conversation is going before the person speaking does.

His longest-running idea on Instagram is Public Relations Co., an Instagram-native show about “the world’s premier PR firm for the publicly hated.” The agency takes on clients whose reputations are already wrecked and tries to make the disaster presentable. Every new scandal gives the staff another impossible assignment, while the same office and employees hold the series together.

His other sketches move through awkward dates, friendships, jobs, and men working too hard to look smarter or tougher than they are. Thatcher rarely pushes the characters into cartoon territory. They still believe they are behaving normally, which makes the failure easier to recognize.

His screen credits include The Mosquito Effect, Living Dead, Student Affairs, Cinco de Mayo Is Not a Thing, and the 2026 comedy series Casen Pointe: True Crime Detective (Shout out ). He continues acting in other projects while writing and directing material for his own pages.

Thatcher does not dress the sketches up much. He relies on timing, blocking, and the performers sharing the frame. Someone can enter at the wrong moment, overhear the last sentence of a lie, or sit silently while another character keeps making the situation worse.

Instagram has brought Thatcher the larger audience, while YouTube holds years of sketches in one place. Across both pages, the same group of collaborators keeps returning, and Public Relations Co. gives them a recurring world without swallowing everything else he makes..

Three Things We Love About Timothy Thatcher

Public Relations Co. has a repeatable premise: “The world’s premier PR firm for the publicly hated” can take on a new reputational disaster every episode, while the agency and its employees give the series continuity.

He writes for the entire group: Thatcher does not treat the other performers like props waiting for his punchline. The laugh can come from the person speaking, the person listening, or the person quietly realizing the conversation has gone completely sideways.

He knows how to use the room: A late entrance, a background reaction, or someone overhearing the wrong sentence can change the sketch. Thatcher does not have to cut away from the scene to find the next joke.

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“In five years I want Romantical to be an emotion and an adjective. I want you walking down the street, looking at a couple sharing a martini in a window at a restaurant, and thinking to yourself—damn, that’s romantical. That’s all I care about.”

That’s Jonah Feingold describing the company he is building. Not a slate. Not a production shingle. A word he wants people to use when they see something that makes them believe in romance again.

It sounds soft until you look at the business underneath it. Romantical is designed to make films, short-form digital series, brand partnerships and live events, all built around one genre identity and one audience. The movies are an output. They’re not the whole business.

Nora Ephron created in two sandboxes—first books like Heartburn, then movies. When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail. Her characters were smart but accessible, funny but grounded, romantic without being overly sentimental. Her name guaranteed a feeling.

Today a writer or producer might pitch something as “Nora Ephron-esque.” That means the work has an essence, a recognizable emotional DNA. The Nora Ephron of right now wouldn’t stop making movies. She’d raise a round and build a company around that feeling so it could live in more places than a movie theater.

That’s what Jonah is attempting. The company is called Romantical.

Jonah the Founder

Jonah is a USC film school grad. He has directed five features already at 35—four of them rom-coms—plus a growing body of work on social. And he has stopped introducing himself as a director.

“Today as a professional, I’ve sort of started introducing myself as a founder. Five years ago I was a director, five years before that I was an aspiring director, and five years before that I was a video editor—which maybe speaks to where we are today.”

I’d been hearing about Jonah and Romantical for a while. As is often the case in the creator world, it took one introduction and a text to get us on Zoom. Jonah pointed out how different that is from Hollywood. Try getting to the head of Sony. First you have to find a path to the person. Then you get an opening in November. Then the meeting gets canceled three times. In this world you text, get on Zoom the next day and might be doing business together a week later.

We talked a few times. He sent me his fundraising deck. I watched his work. He has already raised a meaningful chunk of capital, mostly from friends and family with a few strategic people mixed in. The company is still early enough that some of what follows will change. That is part of what makes it worth looking at now.

Jonah loves the classic rom-coms. He talks about Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder as much as Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers. But he is just as fluent in creator culture, understands algorithms and knows how to wrangle brands into funding content. In other words, he is the Open Garden—the convergence on two feet.

In One Word: Enchantment

I’ve written before about how the biggest creator businesses can be boiled down to a single emotion. MrBeast is survival. Dude Perfect is wonder. The emotional idea travels across movies, television, social, live events and merchandise even when the formats have nothing else in common.

When I asked Jonah for his, he didn’t give me a mission statement. He gave me the couple sharing a martini.

My word for it is enchantment. That’s my word, not his. It’s a real belief in romance and a conspicuous lack of cynicism. It also comes from a genuine place in Jonah. The first movie that made him want to make movies was Hook. He was four, watched it a thousand times, dressed as Captain Hook—the whole thing. Then came L.A. Story, Albert Brooks, Big and You’ve Got Mail. He eventually worked his way backward to Billy Wilder, Lubitsch and Capra.

There is also his doctorate in the creator side. In 2015 he worked at BuzzFeed alongside the Try Guys and Quinta Brunson.

“Everyone gives MrBeast credit for titling and thumbnails. This is all shit that BuzzFeed was teaching us. BuzzFeed invented proprietary software that would put fake thumbnails onto our videos on the BuzzFeed site and rate which ones did better—and then we’d update the YouTube video after. This is before YouTube even allowed thumbnail testing.”

Classical Hollywood on one hand. Thumbnail A/B testing on the other.

The Machine

Romantical is built around Jonah’s simple conviction that it’s silly for a movie to live and die on an opening weekend. So true. I always compare movies to opening a restaurant. You design the menu and the room. You hire great people. You market it. The place starts filling up—and two months later you shut it down. Then you wait two years and hope those patrons find you when you open a completely different restaurant somewhere else.

That’s what a movie is like. So much work goes into building an audience that the business then treats as disposable. Romantical is an attempt to keep the restaurant open.

There’s a personal version too. Jonah was tired of moving from job to job without owning anything—the director-for-hire life, in and out of someone else’s production, no equity, little upside, on to the next one. Almost nobody working on a movie is truly invested in whether it succeeds long term. Backend points exist on paper. They rarely pay out.

Romantical is partly built to change that: give the people making the work real participation, not only a credit and a wrap gift. That is not a minor detail. It’s the commerce part of the system working backward into the community part. Jonah is trying to build ownership into the foundation instead of negotiating for it once everybody is successful.

The machine has three broad engines.

1. Filmettes

Filmettes are short cinematic rom-coms released natively on YouTube. He has already made pieces like Twixmas and I Dumped Four People in One Day. They sit somewhere between an Instagram Reel and a feature, and they function as creative laboratories with an audience attached. You find out whether a character or comic idea lands before anybody commits a feature budget. Each one can be cut into ten or more short-form assets and anchor a month of distribution.

They are also largely paid for upfront by brands. Twixmas was made with Tinder. Skylark funded a location shoot in London for Good to See You 2. The distinction Jonah is drawing is important: the brand isn’t placed into the plot after the fact. It helps create the reason for the plot. The IP gets built without Romantical carrying the entire cash burn.

“Half the time people just want to be cool. They want to send their boss the video on a Monday and say, hey, look what we made.”

He is equally blunt about why the money is hard to close.

“I’ll be talking to the product placement team, the digital brand marketing team, the commercial production team. They’re all different people, sometimes in different states, sometimes in different companies, but representing the same company.”

Every producer who has chased brand money recognizes this. The budgets exist. The people controlling them live in different buildings and operate on different clocks.

2. Features

The features will be financed outside the traditional system where possible: Romantical capital, outside investors, brand partners and economically priced production. Then theatrical distribution and the downstream windows.

One of the first is For the Boys, an R-rated rom-com Jonah describes as Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire meets Wedding Crashers and The Hangover. Two women disguise themselves as men and infiltrate a bachelor party in Key West. The project came sideways out of Busboys, the R-rated ensemble comedy he made with David Spade and Theo Von.

The interesting part is what surrounds the movie. Jonah plans to shoot a digital series in the same production orbit—roughly forty episodes released weekly, all connected to the wedding at the center of the film.

“And of course, if for whatever reason people don’t make that connection, it’s at least in service to Romantical as a brand.”

I love this idea. It has been tried before, but the timing was wrong. Brands have trouble betting on features because the production and release cycles are too long for annual marketing budgets. They will bet on a series. If a brand funds the series leading into the movie, and the series works, Romantical can return as the release approaches and make a much stronger case for marketing dollars. That is a real bridge between the speed of brand media and the long clock of a feature.

3. Live and Physical

Quarterly events. Screenings. Panels. Eventually dating events, a run club, movie nights, a book club, merchandise. This is where the name starts doing work that no individual film can do.

A Romantical dating event should not feel like generic speed dating with a logo taped to the wall. It should draw people who want Jonah’s version of romance: optimistic, playful, maybe a little nostalgic. Even when nobody falls in love, the night should feel spontaneous enough that people want to come back.

Each piece of media and every event becomes a way to find those people and bring them into a community that lasts. The eventual dream is recurring revenue—a subscription business built around people who trust the taste and the emotional promise of Romantical.

McKinsey recently tried to put a dollar value on an hour of attention. Social video generates roughly twenty-five cents. Live experiences can generate somewhere between seventeen and thirty-three dollars. Read that lazily and you’d think Jonah should skip the cheap stuff and go directly to events. But the cheap stuff is where the audience gets built. The filmettes are not a compromise on the way to the real movie. They are R&D and audience development happening at the same time, at a price where Romantical can fail cheaply and learn quickly.

The Hard Question

The romance business has moved hard into creator media over the last five years: audio incubators like Meet Cute, bootstrapped studios like RomComPods, subscription audio at Quinn and Dipsea, social reading at Fable and Realm, and an enormous vertical micro-drama business that has turned romance into cliffhangers and coin-unlock paywalls.

Jonah is making a different bet. He wants to preserve the handmade, cinematically respectable version of the genre and give it an always-on business model.

Here is the skeptical version, because I don’t think the article is honest without it. Building a company around a genre is fundamentally different from building one around a person. Most creator success stories—MrBeast, Dude Perfect, the whole list—begin with a specific human being an audience has decided to trust. The brand and the person are the same thing, at least at the start.

Romantical is trying to build loyalty to an idea instead. A feeling. An adjective. Something you can point to through a restaurant window. That is harder. Genres don’t show up in your DMs. Genres don’t have a face people recognize at the airport.

Jonah knows this. It is the open question underneath the whole company: can Romantical become the draw, or will Jonah have to become the face that teaches the audience what Romantical means? Nobody knows yet. If the brand works, though, it can eventually survive him. A company built only around a person caps out at what that person can produce and how long they want to keep producing it. A company built around an emotion can outlast a career—if the emotion is real and the system holds.

If I Were Him

I’ll say the quiet part. If I were building Romantical, I would build it as a community company that happens to make movies, not a movie company that hopes a community eventually shows up. That is an ordering decision, not semantics. It changes what you build first, what you measure and who you hire.

I would start with the ideal member. Not the target audience—the ideal member, singular and specific. Gina Bianchini, who built Mighty Networks and has thought about this longer than almost anyone, has a useful way of defining that person: an actual human in a transition. Not “women 18–34 who like rom-coms.” Somebody at a specific moment of change, when they are motivated to find other people and willing to pay for help, access or belonging.

Who is that person for Romantical? Someone newly single and done with the apps? Someone who just moved to New York and wants a social life? Someone who still believes in love but has run out of places where that belief doesn’t feel embarrassing? I don’t know the answer. Jonah needs to pick one, build for that person and be equally clear about who the community is not for.

Then I would define enchantment on purpose. It is already in the filmettes, in the features Jonah chooses and in Jonah himself. But right now it mostly lives in his instincts. It needs to become a standard he can use to judge a script, a brand partner, an event, a hire and the easy cynical joke that might get a laugh but violates what the company is supposed to mean.

When we built a community strategy for Brass Knuckle Films—the action label Robert Rodriguez launched with Alexis Garcia—we ended up with three verbs: launch, grow, activate. The genres could not be more different, but the sequence applies almost perfectly here.

Launch means public-facing media made to stand on its own: the filmettes, the digital series around For the Boys, Jonah talking directly to the audience and events that give the audience something to do together. Not promotional scraps. Actual programming.

Grow means converting visibility into an owned relationship. Email addresses. Phone numbers where appropriate. Attendance history. Repeat viewing. Referrals. The information that tells Romantical who keeps showing up and why. Social platforms create discovery. They should not own the entire relationship.

Activate means giving the most committed people a reason to pay and participate: early screenings, intimate events, access to the filmmaking process, member-only rituals and eventually ways to help get projects made. But I would not start by throwing up a subscription page. First establish the habit. Give the community a name, a calendar and a reason to miss it when they are not there.

At my own company, we are restructuring around what I call a digital vertebra. The movies, television and other projects do not sit in separate boxes with social media bolted on at the end. The digital team runs through everything. It understands the DNA of the work and extends it before, during and after release.

Romantical needs the same thing. The early hire I would prioritize is not only a traditional development executive. Jonah needs a creator-editor-community operator who can sit inside the movies, the filmettes and the events and make them feed one another. The company should measure repeat viewers, email capture, event return, referrals and conversion into paid participation—not only views.

That is how Romantical starts learning whether the emotion is becoming a community or is still simply Jonah’s personal taste.

The Weird Bet

For all the talk about recurring revenue, brands and membership, the thing Jonah is most excited to spend money on has no obvious business model.

“I am most excited to make an 80-minute romantic comedy for YouTube on my FX3 with eight other crew members, over seven days of shooting, and put that on the internet and see what happens. That’s us spending money where there’s no immediately clear world in which there’s a return on that investment—which I know from a business standpoint sounds crazy. But I don’t think I can go to YouTube and type in nineties-style rom-com in New York and find something with compelling dialogue and characters falling in love that still feels handmade. And I think people do still value that.”

That’s the tell.

Legacy media is a closed circuit. You plug a production company into a known socket and a known business model comes out. Creator media is an open system. You can do almost anything, which also means nobody can give you a spreadsheet that proves it will work. You bet on yourself, hold onto the core idea and accept that the business may look completely different a year from now.

“In one year we might be talking and Romantical could be—we make martini glasses. We sell furniture.”

Honestly? If the brand is built right, both of those work.

The Nora Ephron of right now would raise a round. Not because movies matter less. Because she would want to own the feeling between them. The point of the company is to keep the restaurant open.

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Before we start, an announcement for our LA-based subscribers. ​Ben Odell (CEO, 3Pas Studios) and Akshay Mehta (CEO, Lighthouse Studios) will be in conversation on building at the collision of legacy Hollywood and the creator economy this coming Tuesday, July 28 at 5pm. The event will take place at The Lighthouse Campus. Make sure to sign up here.

FRESH CLIPPINGS

Hollywood’s New Role in Culture

Reid Litman, the Global Director & Lead on Ogilvy Pulse, and Warner Bailey, the Founder and Host of Assistants vs. Agents, recently wrote a great piece together on bridging the gap between Hollywood and creators. Most importantly, they did it with a genuine focus on finding where the opportunities lie for the next generation.

It starts with data: Gen Z now makes up about 40% of moviegoers, up from 34% in 2019. They’re the largest audience segment, with attendance among the group up significantly over the last year. However, this is not really growth, but a shift in share of what’s becoming a smaller market.

In this environment, where one demographic has such an outsized impact on the success of a title, how do you operate?

Reid and Warner concentrate on discovery. 63% of Gen Z now discovers long-form content through social clips before engaging with the actual movie or show. As they explain, the clip is the new trailer, review, and often the recommendation, all in one.

Hence, the new role of Hollywood.

Since legacy media can’t create cultural relevance any longer, i.e. young audiences don’t look towards studios to tell them what matters, the job shifts from creating the cultural capital to building alongside it.

They go on: Gen Z assigns the meaning through clips, commentary, edits, memes, and shared language. As we know, all of that technically happens outside of the traditional system.

The role then becomes “recognizing that momentum early and building with it instead of trying to manufacture it.”

Ok. But what does that look like in practice? Warner and Reid have some examples:

Bringing creators into campaigns as partners, hiring fan editors, and building alongside communities rather than marketing to them.

In other words, the people who are best suited to create this cultural capital are not executives, but the fans who are participating in it already.

They leave us with some advice:

• Prioritize participation over passive viewing

• Build worlds audiences can help shape long before release

• Invest in fan communities as creative partners, not just marketing channels

• Design every release to feel like a moment worth leaving the house for

Yes, this requires a different way of thinking. But building for convergence is a better bet than fighting over audiences.

Case In Point

Something happened recently related to Backrooms which is an example that illustrates this new reality. And no, this isn’t another post about why the movie succeeded. Here, I want to focus specifically on the nature of the IP itself.

In short: nobody owns it.

If you’re like me and work in legacy media, you’ve probably optioned material. For those who are less familiar, those deals, in simple form, are you as a producer exclusively purchasing the option to produce the material from a writer, etc. And in that same deal, there’s a determined purchase price (typically a range based on budget) which the buyer will pay the writer for the rights to the material.

In even simpler terms, a writer creates something. A studio buys it off them. And then the studio charges an audience for access to the thing.

In certain cases, this can work similarly with creators, but whom do you buy Backrooms from? The audience itself?

This story is incredible: A Reddit user posted that someone had pulled their Backrooms-inspired artwork after a complaint filed on behalf of A24 Films LLC. Kane Parsons, the director himself, saw the thread and commented that he was looking into it and that it should not be happening (imagine that!). By Friday, A24 had issued a public statement, sharing on the official Backrooms X account that online creators "have every right to tell their own version of the story."

The kicker: “A24 clarified that it claims no ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post that started it all, or the community works built around it since.”

Going back to what Reid and Warner wrote about, the new Hollywood studio has to build alongside the fans, not cut them out. A24 could still do movie after movie on Backrooms, and fans would 100% go see them. But the nature of the partnership is collaboration, not buying the creators out.

Once again, this doesn’t mean it’s over for studios. It just means their role is a bit different than before.

Is This an Opportunity for Producers?

Yes.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the new producer class emanating from the creator economy. Today, it feels as relevant as ever.

I was reminded of it because this week, Colin McRae, the Director of Content at Viral Nation and Founder of CMAC Media, published a really interesting post about what the creator economy is missing.

And it’s obviously not creators. It’s builders. The producers and operators who will help turn creators into the next generation of entertainment companies.

Colin explains that the industry doesn't need producers in the traditional sense, but rather producers who think differently, simply because the job is changing.

Before, it felt like you could make a great piece of content and that was that. But, as he explains, it’s no longer enough. Now, you have to think about what it can become.

The producers who thrive will know how to build an audience around the work, grow the IP beyond a single release, and help turn stories into full blown businesses.

At the end of the day, there will be more and more creators, increased platform competition, and money flowing into entertainment. And in that environment, the people who know how to help creators build something bigger than just content are then ones who will win.

GARDEN VIEW

Unusual, but decided to repost last week’s video in case you missed it because it perfectly complements the Backrooms story above.

HARVEST QUOTE

"While it is fun to pit companies against one another — I am guilty of this as anyone — Netflix and YouTube can thrive operating in their respective lanes"

— Bloomberg entertainment journalist Lucas Shaw on the increasingly talked about Netflix vs. YouTube rivalry

Who would have thought?

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

It’s been a wild week for vertical. The Daily Show is making a microdrama. Two Hollywood-backed studios launched on the same day. BuzzFeed committed to more than 100 titles. MIPCOM carved out dedicated real estate for the category. And an AI chatbot company decided episodes needed a chat window.

No deep dive this week. Just the headlines that matter, what they mean for the format, and a Weekly Watch I have a lot to say about.

But first-

There’s a lot of action out there right now, though I realize that for many people, it doesn’t feel that way.

For many of the actors and creative professionals in this space, production has slowed considerably since the boom of summer of ’25. People aren’t working every week or booking 30 shows a year. That kind of whiplash is real, and so is the impact on people’s livelihoods.

But from where I sit, and the meetings I take, I believe we’re experiencing a correction, not a collapse.

I believe a second wave is coming, driven by new players and some truly massive platforms that are poised to change the scale and reach of the vertical space.

I’ve been optimistic about verticals since I first discovered them. I can’t promise that the days of working 52 weeks a year are coming back (and, frankly, it’s worth asking whether they should.)

I read something by Truffaut about the creative mind needing to lay fallow. That it’s actually good for short periods of inactivity. Let’s all take a creative breath in.

Because I do believe over the next 6-8 months we’re about to see a major expansion in the genres, formats, and kinds of stories this space can support.

Most importantly, I believe we’ll continue to see the quality evolve—on the audience’s terms.

And we need our creative minds ready for these evolutions.

So yes, I remain optimistic.

Hang in there, friends. I genuinely believe the next chapter could be much bigger than the last.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Comedy Central Is Making a White House Microdrama, and It’s Aiming the Joke at the Format Itself

Source: TheWrap and Paramount Press Express

The Daily Show is producing its first-ever microdrama: Two Billionaires Fight to Dominate the Country… And My Heart! The vertical series spoofs both U.S. politics and the soapy, over-the-top DNA of microdrama itself, complete with a sleepy president, warring tech titans, and a love triangle.

This is a cultural validation milestone. When a 30-year-old satire institution decides the microdrama format is recognizable enough to parody, that’s a signal the tropes, enemies-to-lovers, absurd power struggles, breathless cliffhangers, have entered the mainstream vocabulary. It is the same way sitcoms began spoofing reality TV once everyone already knew the beats.

It’s also a hedge and a stress test. If audiences laugh with the format rather than at it, that’s free marketing for every straight-faced microdrama on the app store. If it reads as mockery, it could accelerate the “guilty pleasure” stigma some in the industry are trying to shed as they chase premium positioning.

Either way, we’re watching to see whether other legacy comedy and news brands follow, testing the validity of the format’s entrance into the zeitgeist.

BuzzFeed Studios Goes All In: 100 Microdrama Titles, Starting With a Gangland Romeo & Juliet

Source: BuzzFeed Studios

BuzzFeed Studios and muVpix, the flagship platform of BlackForge Distribution, have struck a deal to produce more than 100 microdrama titles over the next two years.

The partnership kicks off with Romeo & Juliet, Reimagined, which transplants Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers into the criminal underworld of modern-day Los Angeles. The series was shot in both horizontal and vertical formats, and the larger partnership will span original IP, reimagined classics, and “shoppable” formats built natively for TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, FAST/CTV, and muVpix’s own platform.

This is a scale play, not a toe-dip. A legacy digital media brand committing to more than 100 titles signals the format has moved past “experiment with one show and see” and into full-pipeline production, the same maturation curve linear television and streaming went through.

Two details are worth flagging for the industry. First, the dual horizontal-and-vertical shoot strategy suggests studios are increasingly hedging their format bets rather than committing purely to vertical, treating “vertical” as a distribution layer rather than the entire identity of a show.

Second, “reimagined classics” as a stated content pillar, adapting public-domain IP like Shakespeare, is a smart way to sidestep licensing costs while banking on built-in name recognition. It is a strategy other studios chasing scale will likely copy.

New Short Media Is a New Big Player

Source: Deadline

Veteran producers Alon Shtruzman, the former CEO of Keshet International, and Scott Einbinder have launched New Short Media, a vertical-storytelling studio operating alongside their existing 5X Media banner.

Backed by a “consortium of investors,” the studio is explicitly positioning itself around “brand-name content creators, actors and creative talent,” premium production values, and an early slate that pushes beyond conventional romance into action, thriller, comedy, crime, and reality.

Notably, the launch landed on the same day as another Hollywood-backed vertical studio debut: vertTV, a subscription platform and studio launched by veteran producers Jeffrey Schenck, Barry Barnholtz, and Peter Sullivan.

The genre-diversification angle is the real story here. Microdrama’s breakout success in the United States has largely been built on romance and soap-opera melodrama. This studio, and others like it, are explicitly betting that the format can carry action, crime, and comedy just as well once premium production and recognizable talent are layered in.

The clustering of launches also suggests we may be entering a land-grab moment. Investors and veteran producers could be moving in parallel because they all see the same window, and perhaps see it beginning to close.

MIPCOM Cannes Builds a Whole Track Around Microdrama and Vertical Content

Source: MIPCOM Cannes

MIPCOM Cannes, the major international television and content market running from October 12 through October 15, has unveiled a significantly expanded 2026 program built around vertical storytelling.

The program includes an invitation-only Global Microdrama & Vertical Leaders’ Summit, a live recording of The Media Odyssey podcast dedicated to “premium vertical television,” and a new Vertical Content Speed Matchmaking category on the market’s official platform. The category will join its existing Scripted and Unscripted matchmaking tracks.

Character.ai Wants You to Chat With Your Microdrama’s Characters

Source: Character.ai and The Verge

Character.ai has launched (c.ai) series, a collection of original short-form vertical series with a twist. After watching an episode, users over 18 can open a chat with its characters, ask questions, revisit moments, explore relationships, or roleplay new storylines within the show’s world.

This is one of the clearest attempts yet to bolt an interactive layer onto the microdrama format, and it is coming from a company that did not originate inside the existing vertical-video ecosystem.

Character.ai already has a fandom-heavy audience accustomed to creating characters, roleplaying, and building fictional worlds. That makes this as much a retention play as a content play. The episode attracts viewers, but the chat experience gives them a reason to remain inside the platform after the credits.

If it works, it opens a genuinely new lane. Platforms like ReelShort currently have no equivalent chatbot layer, and a “talk to your fave after the episode” feature could deepen the kind of parasocial engagement that serialized storytelling already encourages.

But it’s worth treating this one with some real caution. Character.ai has faced significant scrutiny over the way its chatbots have interacted with younger users. The company says the character-chat feature for these series is limited to over-18 users, but layering emotionally engaging serialized video onto AI companionship still creates meaningful questions around moderation, age verification, and safety.

Return Offer — Watch Club

Let me say it plainly: Watch Club might be one of the smartest plays in vertical right now, and Return Offer is the proof of concept.

The premise: A cohort of college interns competes for a full-time return offer at a high-stress AI startup, and it gets toxic and ruthless fast. If you’re a fan of SKAM, Industry, or Survivor, which, full disclosure, I absolutely am, this is your show.

The Platform Play

Let’s start with the macro read of the platform, which is that Watch Club is building specifically for a YA audience, and that’s a smart bet.

There used to be an entire ecosystem built around that demographic: dedicated cable channels, appointment viewing, and a whole cultural infrastructure. That infrastructure has largely evaporated. Because that audience has bifurcated across a million places on the internet, nothing has stepped in to capture them in a monoculture-type way.

Watch Club is making a direct run at it, and Return Offer is a well-executed big swing.

What I love is that this show refuses to talk down to its audience. It wears its SKAM inspiration well, not just in tone, but in the way it engages with situations that feel true to that age group, whether it is something they are currently navigating or something on the horizon that they are excited about or bracing for.

It handles this without ever getting gratuitous or “adult” for the sake of it and, even more critically, without being cringey. It respects the stakes through its characters’ eyes, which is exactly why it plays just as well for an older audience.

There are a few “The Summer I Turned Pretty moments,” my term for a moment that reminds you, yes, this is a YA show, but they are the exception, not the engine. The show mostly resists leaning on YA tropes in a way that would alienate a discerning younger viewer looking for something with real substance.

While I can’t recommend it to viewers under 21, I also know that 16- or 17-year-old me would have desperately wanted to watch it. That tension may be part of what makes it work. It feels made for a younger audience without feeling sanitized for them.

The SKAM DNA

The other big SKAM borrow, which I genuinely adore, is the structure.

Episodes are broken up by in-world social-media posts: an Instagram Story here, a LinkedIn post there, each one letting you dip further into the universe between chapters.

And this goes a layer deeper than you might assume. Per Watch Club’s own app description, these character posts go up in real time as the story unfolds, woven directly into the ongoing narrative rather than existing as preloaded bonus content.

That clever mechanic that made SKAM so innovative is perfect for the audience Watch Club is targeting: digitally native Zoomers. It has a Big Brother Live Feeds-style immediacy to it, and it activates real-time FOMO. Miss the update and you have missed a piece of the story as the fandom experienced it.

It’s a smart way to keep an already-engaged audience checking back outside the episode window, teasing future plot, and capitalizing on parasocial relationships. The retention, engagement, and community strategies are richly layered here.

The Craft

The character work is great. Nobody here is a walking stereotype.

You can see the recognizable archetypes the writers are building from, but each character gets fleshed out as an individual with real throughlines of motivations, weaknesses, strengths, goals, and fears.

The writing is naturalistic, which does mean it runs a little slower than your average microdrama. But it’s still considerably faster and more plot-dense than a typical television show.

The camera work is fun, too. It plays with keyframes and handheld chaos to give the show a distinctly digital feel. Sometimes that language heightens the comedy in an almost The Office-style way. In the tenser moments, the same instability starts to feel closer to The Bear. It is a smart visual bridge between internet-native storytelling and television craft.

The romance isn’t overwrought. It’s well-written and genuinely complex, playing with power dynamics and a paramour trope that has real flirtatious, toxic spice to it, running in parallel with a competing slow-burn romance.

The Vibes

(Yes, I’m Giving the Vibes Their Own Section)

I have to give a moment to the color grading, because this show is just nice to look at.

Paired with moments in the score that lean into that Nathan Micay-esque “tech startup” electronic sound, it adds up to a real vibe.

Bottom Line

I’m genuinely excited to see what else comes out of Watch Club.

If you are too, the company is currently hiring screenwriters and casting actors for upcoming projects.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: CrackerMilk

Instagram: 566K Followers

Youtube: 1.8M Subscribers

Tik Tok: 280K Followers

What Is CrackerMilk?

CrackerMilk has spent more than a decade making short Australian sketches that rarely waste a second.

The channel began with Connor McDuff, a Brisbane filmmaker who started uploading videos in high school. He later attended Griffith Film School, where he made the three-part web series F**ed Fairytales as his graduate project rather than the usual standalone short. The series earned an Australian Online Video Award nomination and showed where McDuff’s attention already was. He wanted to make comedy for the internet, not use the internet as a place to store student films.

CrackerMilk’s sketches usually begin with an ordinary situation and one bad rule. The characters accept the absurdity long enough for it to escalate, and the sketch ends before everyone has time to settle into the premise. CrackerMilk does not spend thirty seconds preparing a joke the audience understood in five.

The channel gradually grew into an ensemble. Elias de Weger became one of its central writers and performers. Chris Slater’s Dad developed into one of the most durable characters. Tamara McLaughlin joined with acting credits that include independent films and Thor: Ragnarok. Lachlan “Goob” Kristofer produces the podcast and appears throughout the wider CrackerMilk world.

Viewers now follow the cast as much as the characters. The CrackerMilk Podcast regularly puts Connor, Elias, Chris, Tamara, and Goob around the same table to talk through their work, friendships, arguments, and whatever humiliation followed them into the studio that week.

The podcast has passed 120 episodes, with titles such as “Dad Takes Over the Podcast,” “How Tamara Joined CrackerMilk,” and “Goob Crashes Out.” The sketches introduce the cast through performance, while the podcast lets the audience spend time with the people underneath it.

Patreon members receive weekly exclusive sketches, uncut podcast episodes, and production material. A recent post followed the team on a writers’ retreat, giving paying fans access to the process that produces the next round of videos.

The merchandise is built around characters and references from the channel rather than a generic logo. Tamara Pigeon, Tinder Fish, Take Chair, and other inside jokes have become shirts, hats, and tote bags. Anyone outside the audience would probably be confused, which is part of the appeal.

In 2023, the team raised money and produced a 20-minute Halloween pilot directed by McDuff. Chris Slater’s Dad character anchored a longer story with more production, a larger cast, and enough time for the ensemble to share one narrative.

The operation now resembles a small Brisbane sketch studio. The channel supplies a constant stream of new ideas, the podcast strengthens the audience’s connection to the cast, Patreon supports extra production, and the pilot gives the team a longer form to pursue.

CrackerMilk did not wait for Australian television to decide whether the group deserved a show. They made one minute at a time until the longer version became possible.

Three Things We Love About CrackerMilk

The cast became the franchise: CrackerMilk began as Connor McDuff’s channel, but the audience now follows Elias, Chris, Tamara, and Goob as closely as the characters they play. The podcast made the chemistry between them part of the appeal.

They built a working sketch room on YouTube: More than 1,500 uploads do not come from waiting around for inspiration. CrackerMilk has writers, recurring performers, production roles, and a steady process for turning new premises into finished sketches.

The sketches do not disappear after the upload: Dad, Tamara Pigeon, Tinder Fish, and Take Chair keep resurfacing in podcast stories, merchandise, and longer projects. CrackerMilk has taught the audience to remember the bits instead of simply scrolling past them.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

The Desperate Race for Creator IP

The hunt for the next Backrooms or Obsession is underway, almost to a comical point. Though the people who have been watching this space for years are suddenly finding themselves with a lot of leverage they did not have six months ago.

Multiple producers and creators held off on taking their projects to market until after Backrooms hit theaters in May, sensing that studio executives were about to develop a powerful appetite for internet-derived IP. The instinct proved correct. Projects that had been sitting in development conversations suddenly attracted bidding wars within days of the box office results coming in.

Internet horror, whether found-footage YouTube series, viral creepypastas, or fan-built fictional universes, has been generating massive audiences for years with essentially no financial return for the people who made it. Backrooms and Obsession demonstrating to studios that the audience was already there and willing to show up in theaters effectively changed the negotiating position of everyone sitting on similar IP overnight.

The ownership questions the piece raises but does not fully resolve are going to become increasingly important as this rush accelerates. It talks about the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction collective where hundreds of authors have spent more than a decade building an interconnected universe of supernatural horror under a Creative Commons license.

Well, it is now reportedly being targeted for adaptation. Creative Commons licensing, which requires derivative works to carry the same open license, is not a framework Hollywood’s IP-hoarding infrastructure was designed to work with. How those contracts get structured, and whether the original creators of these collaborative universes retain anything meaningful when the machine comes for their work, is a question the industry will have to answer.

Now that Hollywood has arrived to monetize Creator IP, the question of who benefits, and on what terms, will be a central point on the convergence timeline.

The Deals

Trevor Henderson, the creature designer whose viral internet creations have now accumulated billions of views, landed two major studio acquisitions in the span of a week. Warner Bros. won a five-studio bidding war for Siren Head, with Brian Duffield directing and Zach Cregger co-writing. Duffield and Cregger, mind you, are two of the hotter creative forces working in Hollywood horror right now, which tells you how seriously WB is treating the IP.

Then, before that deal had even settled, Sony’s TriStar moved pre-emptively to acquire Cartoon Cat, Henderson’s other viral creature, before anyone else could bid. Henderson had made essentially nothing from either character for years despite their ubiquity across YouTube, games, and fan communities. Two weeks later, he is a millionaire with two studio deals and his original rights largely intact on Cartoon Cat.

The Mandela Catalogue went even bigger. Alex Kister’s analog horror YouTube series, which has accumulated over 100 million views across its official episodes alone, sold following an 11-studio bidding war to United Artists, Amblin Entertainment, and Amazon MGM Studios. Steven Spielberg is producing. Kister, who is 22, will direct the feature from a screenplay he adapted himself.

What these three deals have in common is that none of these properties were discovered by Hollywood. They were built by creators over years with audiences that chose to show up without any marketing budget or institutional support behind them.

YouTube Formalizes the TV Format

Elsewhere, YouTube announced that creators can now organize their video playlists into shows and seasons, complete with episodes, consistent branding, and series-level metadata. The feature lets creators either restructure existing playlists or build new shows from scratch through YouTube Studio.

The platform’s own definition of a show is interesting: “a collection of high-quality episodes with a clear connection across them, consistent hosts where possible, a uniform look and thumbnail style, and higher production quality for both video and audio.”

Sounds a lot like the language of a television network describing programming standards and not very much like a social media platform describing user-generated content. After all, they’re winning Emmys now.

This is a pretty meaningful step in the continuation of YouTube’s push to the living room. Giving creators the tools to present their work as a “show” rather than a “playlist” (words matter) is how you get audiences to change their perspective on what the platform is.

GARDEN VIEW

A little more on internet IP. While studios chase creator horror and creature lore, Italian Brainrot is getting its moment. This video captures a fascinating battle playing out in real time over brainrot internet IP.

HARVEST QUOTE

"Netflix is never going to beat YouTube at its own game, no matter how many food influencers or quack psychologists it signs up for shows."

— Entertainment journalist Matt Belloni on Netflix’s recent short-form video ambitions

I wrote about this topic last week, and the conversation has only gotten louder since. Simon Owens recently wrote about the dilution of the Netflix brand, and the argument gaining traction among analysts is a simple one: better, more premium, and more curated is the winning position for Netflix, both with advertisers and on Wall Street, while also delivering the most attentive audience in subscription streaming.

Trying to out-YouTube YouTube seems like a lost cause for legacy media.

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, YouTube-born franchises make their way to Netflix, WWE enters the microdrama ring, a Hitchcock classic is recut for phones, and RoseBerry launches a new home for original and repurposed vertical television.

But First-

Editor’s note: This week, Second Rodeo’s own Stacy Howard wanted to write about her steadfast belief and love of horror and its potential in the vertical space. I’ll let her take it from here:

THE FUTURE WAITS IN THE DARK

by Stacy Howard

Horror may be the most versatile genre in storytelling. It reaches into parts of the human psyche that few other genres can. Since the dawn of humanity, we’ve been fascinated by what we don’t understand. At its best, horror explores our deepest fears, our darkest impulses, and the things we’d rather not admit about ourselves.

Lately, horror has been impossible to ignore. Even seven and nine weeks after the releases of Backrooms and Obsession, respectively, both films were still generating seven figures at the weekly box office—a reminder that great horror doesn’t just open well, it has the ability to sustain audience interest long after opening weekend.

It’s also one of the industry’s greatest proving grounds. Some of the most influential filmmakers working today got their start in horror, where limited budgets often demand exceptional craftsmanship, creative problem-solving, and bold storytelling. It’s a genre that consistently rewards originality.

Just as importantly, horror continues to be one of the healthiest businesses in entertainment. Low- to mid-budget horror films regularly deliver some of the highest returns on investment in Hollywood, they remain remarkably resilient at the box office even as audience tastes shift, and horror fans are among the most loyal genre communities, eagerly embracing new voices and original ideas.

That’s why we believe horror matters so much for vertical storytelling. Its immediacy demands it. It’s structure can take it to new heights.

If premium vertical series are going to become a lasting entertainment medium, they need genres that push creators creatively while giving audiences something they can’t stop watching. The tension, cliffhangers, mystery, and emotional intensity that define great horror also happen to be the building blocks of great episodic vertical storytelling.

The question isn’t whether horror belongs in verticals. It’s who will truly unlock it first.

Who will discover the storytelling language that makes vertical horror feel native to the medium? Who will build the first breakout franchise that audiences can’t put down?

My bet is it’ll be the people willing to take a risk on something they truly love.

I plan to be one of them. Who’s coming with me?

Good Mythical Morning Expands From YouTube to Netflix

Beginning September 7, new episodes of Good Mythical Morning, Mythical Kitchen and Last Meals will arrive on Netflix the same day they publish on YouTube, suggesting the next phase of creator-to-streamer deals may be less about leaving digital platforms behind and more about extending proven internet franchises across both ecosystems.

WWE Steps Into Microdrama With ReelShort

WWE is partnering with ReelShort on an original live-action vertical starring Drew McIntyre, Joe Hendry and Jacob Fatu alongside microdrama regulars Marc Herrmann and Chase Mattson. It is a natural meeting of two forms built around heightened characters, serialized conflict and cliffhangers, and another sign that major fandom businesses see vertical as an extension of the core franchise.

Hitchcock’s The Lodger Is Recut for the Phone

Tattle TV has divided Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent thriller into short vertical chapters, using AI-assisted reframing to bring the classic to mobile audiences. Less a blueprint than a provocative experiment, it raises the increasingly relevant question of whether legacy libraries can find new life through format translation, or whether vertical still demands stories built for the medium from the start.

Epis, From RoseBerry Media

Epis is entering the market with a different version of the premium vertical pitch. Rather than building its catalog almost entirely around original romance and revenge dramas, the app combines new mobile-first productions with established television programs adapted into short vertical episodes. Its launch catalog includes more than 100 titles across drama, reality, dating, documentary and true crime, with library partners including A+E Global Media, All3Media International, Banijay Rights, Cineflix Rights and Fremantle. The strategy positions vertical as more than a production format. It becomes a new distribution window for existing television IP, while giving RoseBerry a place to test which genres and properties translate successfully to mobile. The opportunity is clear: unlock new audiences and revenue from catalogs that already exist. The larger test will be whether audiences experience these adaptations as a natural evolution of the original programs, rather than television compressed to fit a smaller screen.

The Platforms Are Starting to Look More Like Home

For the past two years, the vertical drama boom has largely been defined by dedicated apps such as ReelShort and DramaBox. These platforms did more than prove there was an audience for premium, serialized, mobile-first storytelling. They built the production pipelines, recommendation systems and payment models that helped establish an entirely new entertainment category.

But this week offered another reminder that the category is beginning to spread beyond those original borders.

Netflix is bringing three established YouTube franchises onto its service without taking them away from YouTube. WWE is entering microdrama through an original partnership with ReelShort. Epis is combining original vertical productions with BBC and Channel 4 programs reformatted for mobile. Tattle TV has attempted a similar experiment with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film The Lodger.

YouTube, meanwhile, is approaching the same shift from another direction. As more automated content reaches the platform, the company has said it is working to reduce the spread of low-quality, repetitive AI content while preserving the openness that allowed its creator ecosystem to grow.

At first glance, these moves do not seem particularly related. Together, they suggest that digital-first and mobile-native entertainment is becoming less isolated from the rest of the media business.

That does not mean dedicated vertical apps are being replaced. Those companies continue to finance productions, develop talent and refine the storytelling and monetization systems that made the format viable. Larger platforms bring something different: enormous existing audiences, established creator communities and recommendation systems designed to connect content with viewers who may not already be looking for it.

Other creator industries have moved through versions of this transition. YouTube’s 2017 “adpocalypse” demonstrated both the scale and vulnerability of building on an open platform, as a shift in advertiser confidence quickly reshaped monetization and the kinds of content that could thrive. TikTok later replaced its Creator Fund with a Creator Rewards Program prioritizing original videos longer than one minute, changing its incentives as audience behavior matured. In music, artists releasing directly through distributors have grown faster than the wider recorded-music market, expanding the paths available to creators without eliminating labels.

Vertical may ultimately follow a similarly mixed path.

Some projects will continue to thrive inside closed, purpose-built apps. Others may benefit from open platforms where audiences, creators and fandoms already exist. Legacy libraries may find new distribution windows, while original productions move more easily between mobile apps, social platforms and traditional streamers.

For creators and studios, this may be the most encouraging part of the moment. More platforms experimenting with vertical means more potential business models, more routes to viewers and more freedom to find the right home for each story.

The question is no longer whether premium vertical storytelling belongs in the entertainment landscape.

The more interesting question is where it will feel most at home.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Subscribe now

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Tyler Bender

Instagram: 261K Followers

Youtube: 283K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 590.5K Followers

Who Is Tyler Bender?

Tyler Bender became nationally known by playing a version of her own mother.

In July 2022, she filmed a grocery-store video satirizing skinny moms on diets. Bender walked over to a bulk dispenser, removed a single nut, and tied it inside a little plastic sack. She expected people to find it strange and move on. Instead, viewers recognized their mothers, their childhood kitchens, and the food rules they had absorbed without anyone naming them.

The Almond Mom character became a hashtag and a national conversation about diet culture. Good Morning America covered Bender twice, and Hulu’s Impact x Nightline devoted an episode to the phenomenon. Bender appeared with her mother, Sara, and the two spoke openly about the behavior behind the parody.

Bender later turned to tradwife content. Her parodies put her in a frilly dress narrating domestic perfection while store packaging remains visible in the kitchen. She bakes fresh bread because “it’s the yeast I could do,” delivering every pun with unnerving cheerfulness.

Her longer YouTube videos separate homemaking from the ideology wrapped around it, tracing the political messages, historical fantasies, and gender rules underneath the aesthetic. Bender can play the character and then explain where the joke came from.

She grew up Mormon outside Salt Lake City and studied musical theater at the University of Utah before leaving the program. Almond Mom has her own posture, gestures, and relationship with food. The tradwife has a costume, vocal register, and fixed smile. Bender holds a character through a full scene rather than relying on a wig and one repeated line.

In 2025, she launched Tyler’s Kitschen, a YouTube show and podcast where she bakes with uneven results while talking through pop culture, internet drama, and feminism. Episodes have covered the Tea app data breach, Cracker Barrel’s logo controversy, teenage tradwives, the manosphere, and the move from girlboss culture toward domestic submission.

Her channel also includes The Content Bunker, reality television breakdowns, audience questions, and longer scripted pieces, including a Christmas musical parody and comedy involving AI girlfriends.

Her Substack covers growing up Mormon, dating, reality television, feminism, health, and her first year in Los Angeles.

The broader business runs under the On A Benderr name. She sells merchandise through Fourthwall and distributes Tyler’s Kitschen as a podcast while continuing to make the characters that introduced her.

Bender has said she wants to create and star in her own television series. She already has recurring characters, several formats, a show with its own set, scripted experiments, and an audience willing to follow her from a short parody into a researched cultural argument.

Three Things We Love About Tyler Bender

She knows the women she parodies: The Almond Mom came from behavior Bender saw inside her own family, and she sat beside her mother on national television to discuss it. The characters are exaggerated, but the recognition comes from somewhere real.

Tyler’s Kitschen has an actual format: Bender is not just talking at a camera. She is baking badly, moving around the set, and letting the recipe compete with the argument. The episode still has somewhere to go after the first joke.

She stays funny when the costume comes off: The tradwife material works as character comedy, long-form criticism, and personal writing without turning into three different versions of Tyler. The point gets sharper, but the comedy never disappears.

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TV is shrinking, and everyone in it is choosing one of three responses.

Some people are leaving outright — taking the marketing job, the vertical-video job, anything that isn’t scripted. Some are staying and squeezing what’s left out of a shrinking pie, chasing the same 22-episode dream that mostly doesn’t exist anymore. And a smaller group is doing something more interesting: taking the actual craft — not the credential, the craft — and finding out it’s worth something in a field that has never had it before.

Andrew Karlsruher is that third group. He spent fifteen years in network television — CSI: Cyber, five seasons on MacGyver, a season on Bull — before the development treadmill ran out from under him.

Somewhere in the last year, he noticed something: the humanoid and quadruped robots showing up in our homes, our sidewalks, our hospitals are, whether their makers admit it or not, characters. They have names, faces, voices, backstories, arcs. Somebody has to write them.

To sharpen his thinking around this he launched a substack called Story Layer where he could explore what it means to merge storytelling and robotics. That and some luck actually landed him a job.

Karlsruher is now Head of Character at Familiar Machines & Magic, the robotics company founded by Colin Angle — the guy who built iRobot and the Roomba — which came out of stealth earlier this year. He’s applying fifteen years of network TV instinct to a genuinely new kind of writers’ room: one where half the collaborators speak AI, half speak actuator torque, and none of them have ever had to think about story arcs before.

What follows is an edited conversation about how he got there, and what it actually means to write a character that has to be right — not just entertaining — because it’s going to live in someone’s house.

From Jurassic Park to CSI: Cyber

You wanted to work in Hollywood from early on. What was the entry point?

When did robots enter the picture?

What TV Knows That Robotics Doesn’t

Where’s the actual gap between the tech world and the creative world?

Give me an example.

One thing you mentioned researching for your Substack: Enchanted Tools, the French company doing hospital robots for kids in cancer treatment.

Guardrails and the Manipulation Problem

Let’s say a robot is in an abusive home. You don’t want it absorbing that and becoming an abuser itself. Is there something fundamentally wired in — that whatever personality it develops has to stay in service of the people it’s working for?

What about manipulation — even accidental manipulation? Say there’s an elderly woman who’s decided she can’t climb the stairs anymore, and the robot fakes being stuck partway up so she’ll climb up to help it, and in doing so proves to herself she still can.

The Character Bible

What are you actually building day to day?

Does the character actually change based on how a specific one lives in a specific home — the way a dog isn’t just “a dog,” it’s your dog?

Is This Making Him a Better Writer

Has doing this changed how you think about character — in a way a normal writers’ room never forced you to?

Where This Goes

Do you have a vision for where this leads?

The Sci-Fi Future that Is Today

And maybe, as the Great Convergence keeps converging, Andrew ends up doing both.

Somewhere down the line Andrew writes a show about a family and their robot — the robot you can actually buy, on Amazon, personality made to order, with one-click on Prime delivery.

You’ll join a community of equally deranged owners posting zany-adventure videos: robot folds the laundry while twerking to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body,” robot does the dishes while recapping the juiciest bits of Love Island gossip, robot absolutely destroys your kid at Uno and then, somehow, makes everyone feel better about it.

Weirder things are already happening. Andrew’s just the first person with a MacGyver credit trying to give it a character arc.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Netflix Wants You to Stay Longer

Netflix announced this week that it is bringing short-form video from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst, People, Tastemade, and a slate of Penske Media brands including THR, Variety, Rolling Stone, and IndieWire onto its platform. The content ranges from three-minute shorts to 20-minute episodes covering travel, cooking, fashion, celebrity profiles, and home and gardening, discoverable directly from the Netflix homepage.

The initial read from most people is that Netflix is trying to become more like YouTube. Julia Alexander’s take in yeterday’s open conversation with Matt Belloni cuts closer to what is actually happening, and it is worth going through carefully.

Her argument is that Netflix does not actually need to become YouTube, and there is actually no reason it should try. If YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels on TV end up looking mostly the same with a similar batch of non-exclusive creators, neither platform has differentiated itself. Netflix’s strength has always been exclusivity and brand, and that is where it should stay.

The more interesting point is about how YouTube actually works versus how Netflix works. YouTube is a platform built around compulsive viewing across formats. Someone who watches a two-hour podcast might get pulled into a five-minute sports clip about the same topic, then a 45-second short, then something else entirely. The algorithm feeds viewer obsession without requiring any action from the user. Netflix is not built like that, and trying to graft YouTube’s logic onto a premium subscription platform designed around appointment viewing is a structural mismatch.

What Netflix is actually doing, Alexander argues, is something more specific and more defensible. It is trying to deepen fandom around its own premium content rather than compete for general browsing behavior. After a Jennifer Lopez film ends on Netflix, having her Vogue 73 Questions episode available keeps the viewer inside the app and inside the world of that property. After an NFL game on Netflix, a Bill Simmons podcast feeds the same audience without requiring them to leave. The short-form content is not the product. It is the connective tissue around the product that thus increases the fandom.

That’s a pretty coherent strategy, and a meaningfully different one from trying to out-YouTube YouTube. The question is whether the publishers Netflix has partnered with will produce content specific enough to serve that fandom function, or whether it ends up feeling like a general content library that competes with the premium shows rather than extending them.

Shifting credentials

IndieWire ran a piece out of VidCon & Cannes Lions this week that gets at something which is rarely stated this plainly.

The story that opens it is about French YouTube creator Inoxtag making a documentary about climbing Everest. He released it for a single night in theaters across France, and it sold 350,000 tickets in one day across 1,000 screenings, crashing every exhibitor’s website in the process. The next day it went up on YouTube and hit 10 million views in 24 hours. Disney+ later came calling and asked to license it exclusively, which would have meant taking it down from his channel. Inoxtag said no. Disney came back with a deal that left it on YouTube. As his manager put it, Disney wasn’t used to that kind of answer.

The article’s broader argument, though, is an uncomfortable one. Indie filmmakers have traditionally carried festival pedigree, critical esteem, and institutional backing as their proof of worth. As we all know, that system is under pressure not because anyone decided to undermine it, but because the metrics that increasingly matter for legacy studios are bleeding into every content conversation.

A major platform executive told the VidCon audience that the data he weighs most heavily when deciding whether to develop something is accumulated watch time on a creator’s existing content. Filmmakers don’t have that number. Even actors are already submitting social stats alongside their audition reels.

So, what's clear is that indie filmmakers find themselves more and more holding credentials in a language fewer people speak. A Sundance premiere, a strong critical reception, some awards here and there. These things still matter within the institutions that were built around them. But as creators become more central to how Hollywood actually operates, the people making greenlight decisions are spending more time looking at watch time, audience size, and community trust than at what a jury of ten people thought.

And the further the convergence goes, the more the question becomes unavoidable: in a room full of people who speak the language of audiences, what does a festival pedigree really say?

Studios are hiring for convergence

Sony Pictures Entertainment posted a job listing recently that gives a pretty good blueprint for how legacy media is actually adapting to the creator economy. The title is EVP, Head of YouTube and Social Platforms, Strategy and Operations, and the scope of the role is worth walking through.

The person Sony is looking for will be responsible for building and scaling a channel ecosystem across SPE’s entire portfolio of IP and franchises, with a mandate that touches content strategy, monetization, marketing, licensing, legal, consumer products, and cross-functional coordination with Film and TV Chairmen, Studio Presidents, and Marketing leads. Of note, it reports to the Co-Presidents of Global Distribution and Networks, which places it at the highest level of the company’s distribution strategy.

A few specifics from the job description that give us some more color: The role includes developing first-party FAST channels, building direct ad sales capabilities, co-developing IP enforcement and creator engagement policy, and identifying opportunities to integrate Sony Music and PlayStation into the platform strategy.

This is what studios taking the convergence seriously actually looks like in practice. Not a press release about embracing digital, nor a partnership announcement, but a C-suite hire designed to make YouTube and social platforms a core part of how they manage their IP and generate revenue. The role exists because Sony has concluded it can no longer treat these platforms as just a bolted on marketing channel, but rather see it as a core part of the distribution strategy.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"JUST GOT NOMINATED FOR A F***NG PRIMETIME EMMY"

— Kareem Rahma, host of Subway Takes

This is just awesome.

Have a great weekend…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, an Ode to Open-gate, Larry Namer declaring that vertical is Hollywood’s future at VidCon, and Rachel Sennott returning to her digital roots with The Scene.

But First-

I’m partially in the business of reading tea leaves. At least that’s the closest metaphor for myself, and for my team over the past few years to describe the practice of interpreting the trends of an emerging market.

Two years ago, it was our observation about the then-unnamed world of short dramas (the ones we all now call microdramas) that put us in the position we’re in today.

The tricky thing about the future is that history doesn’t repeat itself. It just has a habit of rhyming.

I felt that rhyme today.

The Emmy nominations came out this morning. Sure, the short-form categories are broad. But when I look at who actually got nominated, what I really see is a proliferation of content and a recognition that is independent of vertical or horizontal format.

Three of the four noms in short-form are platformed on youtube. Kareem Rahma, the guy behind the nominee SubwayTakes, said it best in a recent interview: this feels like a watershed moment, the point where traditional Hollywood stops just lurking around digital and starts figuring out how to actually work with it.

I agree. And I think the continued democratization of content is a genuinely good thing.

But like any discipline where commerce and art collide, the most ambitious work is still going to need people with real resources willing to collaborate and push it further.

What I love most about this era, and what I see reflected in today’s nominations, is a simple idea: anyone with a perspective, a story they want to tell, and an audience they want to reach can be recognized at the highest level.

A gold statue is so much more than a physical object. It’s recognition. It’s people lifting other people up. It’s what it feels like when your work gets legitimized. It is art being validated at the highest level an industry has to offer.

But it’s also a signal. Usually from the people who hold the most tastemaking power in the room, telling everyone else to go further.

Today, the TV Academy sent that signal to everyone working in vertical and short-form. And I know exactly what we’re going to do with it: go further.

To be clear, when we’re telling a story, we’re not thinking about statues. We’re thinking about making the best story we possibly can.

But I’d be lying if I said today’s announcement didn’t give me a little more fuel to walk back into the unknown. The blank page. The next shoot day. The unfinished editing timeline that this work always seems to hand you.

So today, I want to recognize that the TV Academy is telling us something. Our peers are telling us something.

They’re telling us to keep going.

That’s exactly the message I needed to hear today.

Onward.

“Subway Takes” Along with other YouTube Shows Receive Emmy Nominations

The short-form series is the first creator-led show backed by YouTube to earn a nomination, alongside 3 other YouTube series, indicating a major push by the streaming app.

Traditional Hollywood Is Investing Big in Internet Stories. Here’s Why

The LA Times surveys why legacy players are treating vertical, internet-native storytelling as a real business line rather than an experiment.

Larry Namer at VidCon: The Future of Hollywood Is Vertical Video

E! founder Larry Namer told VidCon that Hollywood is still making content for the wrong screen, arguing the industry’s future belongs to whoever follows audience behavior over tradition. A notable endorsement of the vertical thesis.

Brands See Content Gold in Microdramas. Will They Muck Up the Moment?

Marketing Dive surveys the branded-microdrama land grab (Crocs, Dr Pepper, JCPenney, and Marc Jacobs among them) finding real engagement wins alongside warnings that treating the format like a rented 30-second ad could undercut the authenticity that makes it work.

Netflix Adds Variety’s “How Well Do They Know?” in New Publisher Video Deal

Netflix will stream short-form video from Variety, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and dozens of other publishers starting in August. Another signal that streamers see snackable, vertical-friendly formats as essential to holding attention against TikTok and YouTube.

With Brand Microdramas, the Talent Layer Is the Real Opportunity

SonderCo’s Sean Akaks argues brands chasing microdrama virality are missing the bigger play: building real, ongoing talent relationships and franchises instead of one-off endorsement deals. A read that pairs nicely with this week’s Marc Jacobs feature below.

The Scene

Platform: Marc Jacobs’ owned social channels (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Website)

Logline: A fashion-world satire following Sennott’s frantic sprint across Manhattan trying to catch Anna Wintour’s eye and land a last-minute Met Gala invite. Marc Jacobs’ new Scene Bag is along for the ride.

Genre: Comedy / Branded

Rachel Sennott’s fingerprint is all over “The Scene,” and that’s exactly why it works.

The Scene Bag is the whole point of the campaign, and yet it’s never the plot. Instead we get fun shots of it like the POV’s from inside the bag itself: a technique that folds seamlessly into Sennott’s dizzying, constant-motion, docu-style handheld aesthetic. Nothing about the integration feels like placement.

The restless, indie, slightly chaotic “it-girl” quality of the filmmaking is precisely the vibe Marc Jacobs is selling with this bag, which makes the creator/brand pairing feel so right.

“The Scene” is available in both horizontal and vertical, and the vertical cut is arguably the better version. Getting only fragments of facial expressions and insert shots forces an extra layer of gritty intimacy and immediacy onto the footage and for a plot that’s essentially one long gallivant across Manhattan, that fragmentary, on-the-move quality is the appeal.

The namedrops and cameos (Francesca Scorsese, the SubwayTakes guy, Anna Wintour as a running gag) these aren’t in your face gen-pub pandering, they’re winks. You either clock them or you don’t, and that’s the design. A pure IYKYK exercise that flatters the audience sharp enough to catch it, and in doing so, quietly sorts viewers into “the kind of person who’d carry this bag.”

And then there’s the writing, which is where Sennott is truly in her element. The entire episode runs on dramatic irony. That gap between what the audience knows and what the character believes is the engine of the comedy, and it’s mined for everything it’s worth, right down to the stuffed puppet rat.

Sennott also understands microdrama stakes in comedy specifically. Getting caught calling the paparazzi on herself could read as a minor beat but here, it’s treated as a genuine crisis — and that’s correct, because comedy thrives on turning molehills into mountains. And those mountains are what makes a microdrama run. The audience laughs because they recognize themselves in the overreaction.

The pacing is another real technical achievement. In a few minutes, we watch her bolt out of the apartment, try to hunt down SubwayTakes guy, getting busted calling Backgrid on herself, mistake a dinner reservation confirmation call for Anna Wintour, spill wine on a stranger thanks to the rat, and get home just in time to discover the invite she already had. That’s six or seven distinct beats back to back. She nails the microdrama pacing. Setting it in New York wasn’t incidental either: that city’s built-in velocity is what makes cramming that much plot into three minutes believable and relatable.

My only real complaint is that there’s only one episode. Marc Jacobs found a way to showcase a $478 bag without a single cringe-inducing moment, inside a format built for a very specific audience, using a creator whose comedic instincts are purpose-built for exactly this pace. Given that Sennott made her name in digital before crossing over to legacy film and TV, none of this should be surprising, but as someone who falls squarely in this target demo, I (Fran) for one loved it.

ATTN VERTICAL FILMMAKERS: WHY SHOOTING OPEN GATE IS A GAME CHANGER FOR 9:16

If you’re about to direct a vertical microdrama, one of the first creative decisions you’ll make is deceptively technical.

What aspect ratio are you actually going to shoot?

On our first microdrama, The Diamond Rose, we shot native 9:16.

We mounted cameras to L-brackets. We committed completely to the final frame.

At the time, that felt right. Scott wanted to discipline himself as a Director, and challenge himself and the DP, to innovate inside the exact confines of the audience experience.

It’s called the Paradox of Constraints. It might be why Hemingway’s six-word story packs such an emotional punch: Boundaries unlock creativity.

On our next vertical, a musical series called PLAYBACK, we had the opportunity to shoot on Sony BURANOs with full-frame Cooke lenses.

This time, we mounted the cameras horizontally and we shot open gate.

Having the option to reformat the show horizontally down the line was a nice bonus. But that’s not why we did it. We did it because, already having had one microdrama under our belt, we knew the constraints and the challenges.

With these in mind, shooting horizontally made the vertical version better.

In post, it gave us the ability to reframe left and right. To fine-tune emotional close-ups. To push in and out and around with fewer boundaries, but with the intention that only comes from experience of restriction.

That kind of flexibility is key when you’re trying to make something that feels precise, cinematic, and emotionally alive inside a vertical frame.

Shooting in 6k, it also let us shoot wider and capture two actors at once, to split them into singles later. This saved us time and gave us room for more ambitious staging, which mattered a lot on a series with 17 musical numbers.

But one of the biggest unlocks was what it gave the actors.

By blocking scenes a certain way, and running a three-camera setup on the full-frame sensor, we were able to give performers more usable takes without slowing the machine down.

On many vertical sets, actors get one or two takes in coverage and then everyone moves on.

Not on this set. One actor told me afterward:

“I was always able to do my best work, even as we shot so many pages. I was never rushed.”

That stayed with me because when you’re shooting 15 pages a day, every edge matters. Every technical choice is also a creative choice. And every creative choice is a chance to protect the performances, elevate the story, and push the medium forward.

The point isn’t that every vertical should shoot open gate. In fact, if it’s your first one, I’d challenge you not to.

The point is that vertical storytelling deserves the same level of thought we bring to any other format. The frame may be smaller, but the choices within these limits can often have a more profound impact on the result, precisely because there is no “wiggle room”.

Every story in this space that succeeds in elevating the medium is a win for all of us.

Happy shooting.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Tom McGovern

Instagram: 555K Followers

Youtube: 41.6K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 623.2K Followers

Who Is Tom McGovern?

Tom McGovern is a musical comedian who treats small, ridiculous premises like they deserve a full arrangement.

He is best known as one third of Wolves of Glendale, the Los Angeles comedy band with Ethan Edenburg and Eric Jackowitz. Tom plays keys and sings, and his work sits somewhere between sketch, theater, and pop songwriting. The music usually goes bigger than the premise has any right to.

Before Wolves of Glendale, McGovern was making solo comedy music in New York. He later moved to Los Angeles, reached out to Edenburg and Jackowitz, and the three wrote “Vapin’ in Vegas” the first day they were all in the same room. The band came together fast, but the fit was not random. Three musicians, one silly title, and enough craft to turn it into a song people remembered.

McGovern’s personal sketches show the smaller version of the same skill set. He does not need a complicated setup. A phrase, a type of person, an awkward mood, or one strange musical choice can carry the bit. A lot of the comedy comes from how seriously he commits to something that should not be sung with that much confidence.

Wolves of Glendale take that impulse and make it louder. The band’s songs are not sketches with instruments underneath them. They are real songs pointed at deeply unserious subjects. “The Gym”, “Loud Ass Car”, “Just Give Me Cash”, “Vapin’ in Vegas”, “Donkey On The Edge.” The titles sound like throwaways until the band gives them hooks, harmonies, structure, and enough musical force to make the premise stick.

The musicianship is not decoration. Wolves of Glendale can play, and that changes the joke. If the song were sloppy, the premise would feel cheap. If the song were too pleased with itself, the joke would collapse. The band lands in the middle: straight-faced, well-built, and committed long enough for the dumb subject to become weirdly emotional.

McGovern understands musical comedy as songwriting first. The laugh comes later because the song has already done its job.

Three Things We Love About Tom McGovern

The songs are built properly: McGovern and Wolves of Glendale do not treat the music as decoration. The hooks, arrangements, and harmonies are strong enough to make the premise last past the first laugh.

The solo sketches and the band share a brain: The personal feed and the Wolves songs both come from tiny social observations, overcommitted performance, and the pleasure of taking an unserious idea too seriously.

He brings stage muscle to internet comedy: McGovern is not only making clips. The work is built to live in rooms, with a band, an audience, and a chorus people can sing even when the subject is ridiculous.

@tommcgovern27What the f is happening here??? #fyp #musicalcomedy #sax

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