This week, we’re rounding up some news, including the explosive announcement from YouTube on Shorts Series. More on that soon as we propose a new framework for where things are headed.

But first….

In a lot of ways, I’ve been waiting almost 3 years for this news.

Yesterday, YouTube announced a lot of exciting changes to the platform, but one stood out to me. Looks like the world’s largest streamer is officially jumping into the Microseries game.

“The company unveiled Shorts series, enabling creators to structure their Shorts into seasons and episodes, a structure that suits living room viewing. The feature is also available to creators on mobile and web.”

At last, audiences will be able to view a collection of vertical shorts in an intended order.

This is truly a game changer.

The Microseries phenomenon can now expand and reach new audiences, and, along with the innovations happening over at TikTok with their microseries products, the ability to properly distribute, and increasingly monetize, microseries is becoming available to anyone.

Now all roads truly lead to the algorithm.

I believe whole new audiences will discover a love for this format. They’ll respond to new genres, stories, and tonalities, which will raise awareness, inspire more storytellers, who will reach more audiences—and we’ll begin to see the true potential of this format.

I was at a roundtable hosted by Hernan Lopez last night, and as always he brought together a fantastic group to talk about the future of verticals. When this new feature came up, you could feel it in the room: there was an understanding that something was shifting.

I’ve always said that the microseries phenomenon was driven in large part by audiences who wanted to experience movies at the speed of TikTok.

Well, count YouTube in now.

I have so many calls to make.

Let’s get to work.

1. YouTube formally builds episodic series into Shorts

YouTube announced Shorts Series, allowing creators to organize Shorts into seasons and episodes - a major infrastructure change for serialized vertical storytelling. It removes one of the biggest barriers to open-platform microdramas: audiences can finally follow episodes in their intended order.
The Hollywood Reporter — “YouTube Wants to Turbocharge Microdramas on the TV Screen”

2. MACRO + MANSA launch a vertical-series partnership

MACRO Television Studios and MANSA Studios will develop, finance, produce and co-own vertical series, a meaningful signal that established Hollywood players see vertical as an IP business rather than simply cheap content. It’s another step toward a premium vertical ecosystem sitting between Hollywood and the existing microdrama apps.
Variety — “Mansa Studios, Macro Television Studios to Produce Vertical Series”

3. China confronts an explosion of AI-generated microdramas

China says roughly 430,000 microdramas were released in the first eight months of 2026, with more than 90% using AI technology, prompting new labeling and likeness rules. Interestingly, regulators are simultaneously encouraging investment in live-action work — suggesting that as production becomes nearly infinite, quality and human differentiation may become more valuable.
China SCIO — “China strengthens oversight as AI fuels micro-drama boom”

4. Brands love microdramas - now they need to prove ROI

Digiday reports that brands are increasingly sold on audience demand for microdramas, but are struggling to measure what those views actually deliver. One striking exception: Bob’s Discount Furniture says its Till Decor Do Us Part generated 152M+ views and nearly $9M in attributable sales, showing what a measurable branded-microdrama model could look like.
Digiday — “Marketers have bought into microdramas — but a lack of ROI might make them irrelevant”

5. COL Group pushes microdramas deeper into Europe

COL Group International has partnered with MediaSpurs to expand microdramas in Poland through distribution, platform partnerships, branded entertainment and production, using the country as a gateway into Central and Eastern Europe. It’s another sign that the major Asian microdrama companies are evolving beyond app launches toward partnerships with existing media and advertising ecosystems.
Señal News — “COL Group taps MediaSpurs to drive microdrama growth in Poland”

That’s all for this week. Follow for more news!

This week, microdramas become a language-learning tool, Lime Pictures brings its soap instincts into vertical, Shorts builds a new production lane, and Content London gives the format a bigger seat at the table. Then, we head to Fast Company Innovation Festival, where Scott joined Michael Sugar and Yasmin Dastmalchi to talk about what happens when brands stop advertising around entertainment and start making it themselves.

But first…

Nothing endures but change.

The folding iPhone feels significant to me.

I’ll admit it: I’m a big fan of Apple. Their ability to blend design, form, function, and execution at an extraordinarily high level has always impressed me.

There are plenty of fair criticisms of them. They’re often not the first to do something. But they have a remarkable history of being the ones who make something feel fully realized for the first time.

And I look at this folding phone as a metaphor for the moment we’re in.

The stories we watch and the ideas we receive are being given to us in an ever-evolving shape; one that slots into the different patterns, screens, and moments of our lives.

Horizontal. Vertical. Square. Whatever comes next.

They’re all possible now.

History really does love to rhyme. And when I look at a folding Apple phone, I see the future continuing to take shape, quite literally.

But I also see a future where our need for authentic, original storytelling becomes more important than ever.

There is so much happening in AI, technology, and the industries that increasingly pervade our lives. And it seems to me that one of the most important things we can do is hold on to our humanity and seek, develop, and collaboratively invent new ways to witness it, recognize it, and remind each other of its importance.

Lately, it feels like the future is happening faster than ever. Because, in many ways, it is. The rate of change keeps accelerating.

I don’t know that it can be stopped. And maybe stopping it isn’t the point. At the end of the day, we are still at the helm. I don’t fear having the wheel ripped from us. I fear we surrender and never get it back.

Through every new shape our technology takes, evolving endlessly towards the thing it has always been, the constant we must never surrender is our humanity.

Nothing endures but change. But our imperfections aren’t bugs waiting to be fixed. They’re part of what makes us human. And our humanity is the thing worth carrying into whatever comes next.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Microdramas Are Becoming a Language-Learning Tool

COL Group and Lingopie have launched DramaRizz, a language-learning app built around one-minute vertical dramas, complete with dual-language subtitles, tap-to-translate features and scene-based flashcards. The companies are also co-producing 10 original microdramas. It’s a new use case for the format itself: the same short episodes, recurring characters and cliffhangers designed to keep viewers watching are now being used to keep them learning.

Hollyoaks Producer Lime Pictures Goes Vertical

Lime Pictures has released its first vertical drama, Revenge Is a Dish, on RoseBerry Media’s EPIS. More interesting than another legacy producer entering the space is where Lime sees the overlap: co-head of scripted Angelo Abela specifically pointed to pacey storytelling, big hooks and the ability to shoot high volumes of high-drama scenes as skills vertical shares with soaps (something we’ve talked about at length in this previous bloom). As legacy and vertical converge, some of the most transferable expertise may already exist in the corners of television built for speed and serialization.

Shorts Builds a New Production Lane

Vertical streamer Shorts has teamed with Full Moon Artists Productions on Love in the Hamptons, which is set to begin filming later this month as part of a new FMAxShorts-branded strand. This dedicated strand of content is looking like a pipeline, with a platform and producer creating a repeatable lane for original verticals rather than approaching each show as a one-off experiment.

Vertical Gets a Bigger Seat at Content London

Executives from ARTE France, Play Media and ZDF are joining Content London’s third Vertical Programming & Microdrama Summit, where they’ll discuss investment, business models and how broadcasters are responding to mobile viewing. This isn’t a new commission, but the room matters. Vertical is increasingly becoming part of the conversation inside the same international TV-market infrastructure where the rest of the industry buys, sells and strategizes around programming.

When Brands Stop Advertising and Start Making Entertainment

WATCH: From Ads to Entertainment: Why Brands Are Becoming Storytellers at Fast Company Innovation Festival. Watch the full panel here.

We talk a lot in The Vertical Bloom about convergence. Hollywood is learning from digital. Digital is borrowing from Hollywood. And increasingly, brands are finding themselves somewhere in the middle.

This week, we got to watch that convergence happen in real time.

Scott Brown joined Michael Sugar, the Academy Award-winning producer behind Spotlight and founder and CEO of Sugar23, and Yasmin Dastmalchi, President of Maybelline New York and Essie USA, onstage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival for a conversation about what happens when brands stop simply advertising around entertainment and start making it themselves.

The conversation was moderated by Grace Snelling, Staff Reporter at Fast Company, who did a fantastic job bringing three unique perspectives into the same conversation.

Michael comes from Hollywood. Yasmin sits inside one of the biggest consumer brands in the world. Scott came up through YouTube and digital before finding his way into scripted vertical.

Three different roads, one increasingly shared conversation.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about this exact challenge in The Vertical Bloom: how legacy entertainment and the creator economy can stop trying to slot one another into their existing machines and instead figure out what each side actually brings to the table.

This panel felt like that idea in practice.

Here are the top-level takeaways I’m still thinking about:

1. “I Don’t Want an Ad.”

Yasmin described one of the biggest changes in how she approaches entertainment partners very simply: she starts by telling them she doesn’t want a traditional 30-second ad campaign.

That changes the conversation immediately.

Instead of beginning with an advertising format and figuring out how to fill it, you can begin with the audience and ask what they might actually choose to watch. Maybe that’s a creator collaboration. Maybe it’s a rom-com. Maybe it’s a microdrama.

The opportunity isn’t just putting brands into new formats. It’s letting the format drive the ideas.

2. Get the Brand and the Storyteller in the Same Room Early

Michael described the traditional advertising process as layers of intermediaries: media buyers talking to ad sales teams, agencies translating briefs, creators often arriving farther downstream.

The problem is that information gets lost.

His example was DoorDash. A writer might hear “food delivery company” and build a story around ordering dinner. But DoorDash may understand its brand much more broadly.

If the storyteller gets access to that thinking earlier, we can shift from a transactional relationship to a collaborative one, which will yield much more fruitful results.

3. Collaboration Works Better When Everyone Knows What They Know

This was one of my favorite parts of the conversation.

Yasmin talked about something she has had to unlearn: the instinct to be the expert on every part of the process.

She knows her brand. She knows its values, its products and its consumer. But when she enters a room with creators and storytellers, she also has to trust that they are experts in their own right.

That sounded very familiar.

In our recent piece about the convergence of legacy and the creator economy, we made essentially the same argument from the other direction. If you bring digital-native people into the room because they have built an audience or mastered a medium, you have to give them enough room to actually apply that expertise.

Equally, they need to trust that the Brand is not only the authority on, but also the expert of the Brand’s values, voice, and target audience.

Collaboration doesn’t require everyone to know everything.

It requires everyone to know what they bring to the table, and to be curious about what others bring.

4. Brands Are Storytellers Too

Scott made the point onstage that brands already have many of the building blocks of storytelling.

They have a voice. They have values. They understand their audience.

Our job as creative people is not necessarily to bolt a product onto a story after the fact. It should be to help translate those existing qualities into entertainment.

When everyone involved is genuinely excited about the thing being made, rather than one side making the content and the other approving it, the work usually gets better.

5. The Format Is Changing Because of Audience Demand

Scott described microdramas onstage as, fundamentally, a movie on TikTok.

Not because a microdrama literally needs to live on TikTok, but because the audience behavior that TikTok helped normalize changed the grammar of entertainment.

A traditional feature can spend several minutes setting the table. A microdrama usually has to tell you almost immediately what its promise is and why you should keep watching.

We think storytelling itself IS a technology. The tools, formats and grammar evolve, in reaction to audiences evolving, in real time.

Digital is growing up.

And maybe this is what convergence actually looks like. Not Hollywood becoming digital or digital becoming Hollywood.

It’s all of us getting a little more fluent in one another’s languages, then building something none of our individual systems would have made on their own.

Thanks again to Michael, Yasmin and Grace for such a thoughtful conversation, and to Fast Company for giving us the opportunity to have it.

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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This week, notes on how to make a good adaptation for microdrama, some highs and lows for branded microseries, and more Hollywood industry leaders joining the scripted vertical world.

But First-

I’ve been thinking about who gets to tell stories.
And who makes those stories possible.

Next week, I’ll be onstage at Fast Company in New York City with Academy Award winner Michael Sugar of Sugar23 and Yasmin Dastmalchi, President of Maybelline and Essie.

We’ll be talking about brands becoming storytellers.
Across film. Television. And vertical microdramas.

Personally, I’m curious.

How does an elevated storyteller like Michael look at this evolving space? What techniques does Yasmin—who leads two of the world’s most impactful brands—use to communicate a message through story?

And where does all of this go next?

I believe scripted digital storytelling is well on its way to delivering work that can stand alongside the shows we love. Work with real craft. Real impact. Work that might even say something about the world along the way.

Are we there yet?

Maybe not.

But it’s early.

And brands will almost certainly be important patrons of what comes next.

So what’s the balance? How do storytellers make something meaningful, brands communicate something true, and audiences come away feeling like their time was respected?

How do all sides win?

I’m excited to share my perspective.

And maybe more importantly, to listen.

Alright, let’s get into it-

The Hollywood Reporter adds Microdramas to their charts of streaming and TV ratings, box office grosses, and industry data.

Vertical Video Studio LoveHit Launches With Adaptations Of Literary Classics Starring Microdrama Regulars & Eric Roberts

LA-based microdrama app LoveHit is launching this month with five classic novel adaptations: Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby and Beauty and the Beast with more in post-production. The projects are being shot and edited as both vertical microseries and horizontal films. The latter of which will head to Cannes in the Fall for MIPCOM.

How Jamie Oliver’s midlife crisis became a Life360 microdrama

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver partnered with family tracking app Life360 for a comedy microseries, Finding Jamie, that puts entertainment first. The Drum shares how director Tom Kingsley led the Baby Teeth project, treating it not as a commercial but a comedy built around Oliver and his family. Jamie Oliver Group reports that this collaboration was the perfect opportunity for Oliver to pitch himself as a comedic performer, and Life360 benefits from prominent placement on Oliver’s social accounts with tens of millions of followers.

E! Co-Founder Larry Namer Predicts Vertical Video Will Become the Dominant Way People Consume Content by 2030

Larry Namer insists that vertical video is here to stay and won’t fully replace TV and film, but should be considered as part of the same ecosystem. Namer warns against Hollywood’s tendency to throw money at a burgeoning platform, and instead encourages investment in the current audience saying, “Produce for the audience, not for yourself.”

Grab responds to microdrama drama, but marketing intent deserves credit

Singapore-based concierge app Grab teased its first branded microdrama last week with the title I Fell in Love With My Grab Driver, which quickly sparked backlash regarding the potential danger of harassment from concierge services. Grab released a statement, explaining that they leaned into the genre for the title. Representative Mindy Yap shares that they chose to make a microdrama in order to showcase their customer, pulling local Singaporean talent and locations. Yap says they still see real potential in this strategy, but they’re learning along the way.

Colombia’s Idilio raises US$5m to scale microdrama platform

TV host and Miss Colombia 2018, Gabriela Tafur, closed $5M in a seed round for Spanish-speaking microdrama platform Idilio. Notably, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s investment firm participated. Katzenberg was also heavily involved in Quibi, the microdrama predecessor that is often quoted as being ahead of the scripted vertical curve.

David Oyelowo & Nate Parker’s Mansa Studios Debuts Slate Of TikTok Microdramas

Mansa Studios will launch three original dark romance microdrama series on TikTok. Oyelowo and Parker are dedicated to championing Black stories and are looking to microdramas as a way of hooking a dedicated audience.

How to Adapt Existing IP for Microdramas

Adaptations are the bread and butter of microdrama studios, as they can be the bridge for a new viewer to become interested in scripted vertical programming. But how do you make your adaptation memorable as opposed to yet another Cinderella story?

If you’re modernizing a classic story, you have to have a deep understanding of not only the original plot but also the characters and their desires. Sometimes the best way to do that is to flip the story on its head and focus on a character other than the original main character. Alternatively, you can have more creative control by adapting a story from history or pop culture.

Modern Tribulations

A modern day adaptation can crumble as soon as someone pulls out an iPhone or mentions social media. Obviously 2026 poses hundreds of challenges to the conflicts and plot points of a story written before 1920. The writers have to honor the spirit of the original in order for the story to work.

Emmy award winning series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries premiered in 2012 on YouTube and told the Pride and Prejudice story through the lens of a YouTuber. In Austen’s novel, Lizzie’s opinion of Darcy shifts after he intervenes in the marriage of Lydia Bennet and George Wickham. The web series honored the stakes of this plot point by having Wickham plan to release a sex tape of Lydia. This change was more impactful to an audience that had witnessed the rise of revenge porn and celebrity sex tapes in a way that a runaway marriage couldn’t.

The series used the same visual language that YouTube viewers were accustomed to. Lizzie recorded from her bedroom, editing included jump cuts and end screens, and even a couple of VidCon vlogs. This bridged the gap for audience members who primarily watched vlog content, or sketch comedy on the platform. The show was organic to YouTube.

Nothing Much to Do (2014) is another YouTube series of note, the New Zealand-based project adapted Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing into a vlog series that further immersed its characters into YouTube culture. They wove plot points into YouTube challenges, Q&As, and “storytime” videos. The story was strung together over three different channels that had distinctly different formats and camera work.

These adaptations brought classic stories into the modern age by leaning into the platform and honoring the characters and stakes of the original works.

The Anti-Hero

With the success of Wicked, I hope that some microdramas take a chance on adapting a character-based retelling. What’s essential with these adaptations is the character study. The plot of the original work needs to be upheld while you give more context to your anti-hero.

In Wicked, the audience learns how the Cowardly Lion became cowardly and how the Tin Man became heartless. Those characters still join Dorothy on her journey, but the audience sees Oz through the Wicked Witch’s eyes instead of the Kansas ingenue’s. Neither the book, the musical, or the movie would work if time and care wasn’t taken with building Elphaba’s internal life and obstacles.

2011’s Once Upon a Time did this dozens of times over with characters from Grimm’s fairy tales, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, Greek mythology, and more. Recently, the BBC has had success with The Other Bennet Sister, which follows Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. Netflix’s Enola Holmes released its third installment earlier this year, and hit over 20M views in the first week. When a new adaptation of Cinderella or Jane Austen’s titles seems to come out every year, a different angle on these stories can excite fans.

Real People Fiction

Alternatively, there’s the option to adapt a fictionalized version of true events. Ryan Murphy makes headlines every year or two with his pulpy dramas about American villains and royalty: Love Story, Monster, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, etc. He’s frequently in hot water due to the fact that he chooses stories with living subjects and doesn’t take any steps to disguise the story with different names, locations, or identifying details.

However, more historical adaptations have been able to approach their subject matter with creativity and humor. My Lady Grey turned England’s nine days queen into a fantasy heroine and quickly built a cult following despite its early cancellation. Hulu’s The Great adapted Catherine II of Russia’s story into a dark comedy. America could be due for its own lighthearted adaptation of historical events. In contrast to the anti-hero storyline, historical accuracy isn’t required for these stories to work. There’s more to be gained by modernizing the characters for a fish-out-of-water comedy than adhering to the strictest timeline of events.

However, there have been more modern retellings that successfully hint at their inspiration while avoiding controversy. The 90s saw multiple “normal girl meets the Prince of England” romcoms on the heels of William and Kate’s romance. 2023’s Daisy Jones and the Six evoked the drama of Fleetwood Mac. And 2024’s Christmas in the Spotlight made quick work of the most talked about relationship of the year: Taylor and Travis.

Again, the success of these stories isn’t in remaining 100% faithful to the source material, in fact sometimes that can lead to harsh criticism. These adaptations work best when you get to the root of why people are still fascinated by the story. Whether it’s the incomprehension of a grisly crime, the tragedy or legend of a historical figure, or the intrigue of romance in the public eye; there’s something that keeps people talking about it. That’s the story and that’s what will make an adaptation addicting and memorable.

TL;DR

• Modern adaptations need to feel genuinely modernized. The same characters and stakes of the original, but with the constraints of the digital age. So you need to deeply understand your characters and the obstacles of someone that age today.

• For a little bit more creative freedom, you can center your story around one of the side characters but you have to be ready to deep dive into their inner life and bring truth to their circumstances and decisions.

• Finally, you can have the biggest sandbox if you choose to play with a story from history or pop culture. But you have to drill down to the core of why people are still fascinated by those people and you have to answer their curiosity.

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: Jo Hoch

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, Kevin Hart’s production company signs on for over 20 microdrama projects, a major Korean film company joins the scripted vertical industry, and some more examples of recognizable IP going vertical. Plus a review of Nuuly’s microseries marketing campaign.

But First-

I learned something important this week.

And I think it could be useful for others as we careen towards each other in this evolving landscape.

Let’s listen to each other, yes. But may I also say…

Let’s make extra sure we’re being heard.

(Asking ourselves if we’re explaining things well. Starting with ourselves.)

I’ve been trading deal terms with a potential partner on an ambitious endeavor. I was concerned about the path forward. It seemed like a central deal point might simply be irreconcilable.

But people around me were candid, and we asked ourselves: Were we truly making our needs clear? Not just technically clear, but completely understood?

So we eliminated the ambiguity. And because we suspected some of the meaning was getting lost in tone, I picked up the phone.

My moment came, and I gave a short monologue. No hedging. No ambiguity. Just a clear expression of what we needed, why we needed it, and why I believed in it.

And you know what?

When I was done, there was warmth and collaboration again. The air was back in the room. The future ahead had shape.

And we’re back trading paper.

I don’t celebrate anything until it’s signed. But I’m really excited about the potential that’s here.

And it all came from getting really clear.

And we started with ourselves.

Like so much often does.

Alright, let’s get into it-

Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat To House Vertical Originals On Microdrama Platform aTwist

aTwist continues its Hollywood recruitment with Kevin Hart’s production company signing on for more than 20 microseries titles. Deadline announced that their slate will be anchored by adaptations of bestselling author Blake Karrington’s books. Hartbeat’s president shared that they’re seeking to tell stories that “the mainstream overlooked” and noted that partnering with a popular author also helps them tap into an engaged audience.

Korea’s Showbox Launches Microdrama Label Showbite, Sets Sights on Global Markets (EXCLUSIVE)

One of the largest Korean film distribution companies is launching its own microdrama label, starting on Tiktok, YouTube, and Instagram this month. Variety covers 14 slated titles, checking off nearly every popular genre with romance, fantasy, period pieces, and mystery.

‘How could you re-create perfection?’: Inside Astral Tequila’s microdrama homage to ‘Practical Magic 2’

Astral Tequila brand director Jenn Rapp shares insights into building a microdrama into a brand deal. Rapp emphasizes that the goal was never to try to perfectly recreate the original margarita scene in Practical Magic, but to use it as inspiration for a new story geared toward younger viewers. They’ve partnered with models-turned reality TV stars and real-life sisters, Brooks and Grace Ann Nader, for the project.

Indie VG ‘Astro Burn’ Starts New Level with AI-Powered Animated Micro-Series

Independently produced video game Astro Burn is cross-promoting the game through a microseries that will upload on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Game designer, HaZ Dulull, emphasizes his creative control and human-led approach to a partially AI-generated production. Showcraft, the AI platform he utilized, sped up the process of creating a story he wrote which he thinks will be valuable in marketing the indie game.

aTwist launches today, bringing a trio of respected TV execs into the microseries boom

The microseries platform aTwist officially launches today, led by three career Hollywood execs betting on vertical storytelling as legacy media continues to contract. We’ve mentioned aTwist in this Bloom and previous editions because of the headline-worthy talent they’ve recruited, but today marks the platform’s official arrival. Jana Winograde explains that amidst the decline of legacy media, she saw more promise in the rise of vertical storytelling. She and her partners are eagerly joining the “wild west” of digital microseries and are putting a lot of trust in up-and-coming talent.

Heart On My Sleeve

Platform: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube

Logline: When Wally is invited to yet another wedding, she’s determined to find her perfect plus one. Will she meet the man of her dreams, or is our girl destined to spend eternity at the Singles Table?

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Nuuly’s new microseries, Heart On My Sleeve, is a well targeted marketing campaign delivered by way of romantic comedy. The microseries follows a quirky-cool 20-something as her friends coach her through dating app disasters, in hopes of finding a date for an upcoming wedding. And in the end, she falls for the boy that was there all along.

The series, totaling 12 episodes and just over 14 minutes, is one of the best branded microseries I’ve seen. Though, I think it’s just the start of what a microseries story can accomplish.

The series is written and directed by Milky Tran, a filmmaker and micro-influencer who you may know from her “3 Adult Things That Happened to Me This Week As An Adult” series. Nuuly’s choice to collaborate with her is brilliant. Tran has been showcasing her writing and filmmaking on her TikTok account and it’s clear that her work resonates with people. Her style is sarcastic, witty, and vulnerable with colorful visuals and playful effects. Her content has become instantly recognizable and has been specified over the course of dozens of one(ish) minute videos.

Her fast-paced storytelling is critical for scripted vertical shows and her editing style lends itself naturally to the cinematic language of microdramas. In Heart On My Sleeve, Tran’s dialogue flows naturally and the jokes are punctuated with smart editing that is attuned to the social media landscape. Edits that indicate a touch of magic realism such as the sped up exit of a character, a fourth wall break, a smash zoom, and whimsical effects are the common language of social media content.

The cast is led by Wally Baram, a writer and comedian who recently became known as one of the stars of Prime’s coming-of-age comedy Overcompensating. Her timing and personality bring charisma to the role. Her friends-to-lovers romantic lead is played by Charles Hsu, an actor who is best known for his POV sketch comedy videos on TikTok. Chine Ikoro rounds out the core friend group, she’s a UCB New York Mainstage performer and she offers a lighthearted whimsy to Baram’s less optimistic character.

I believe the biggest success of this series lies in the on and off screen digital-native talent. These creatives are knowledgeable in the traditional lanes of acting and directing, but they’ve cut their teeth in vertical digital content. What results is performances that feel organic on the small screen and storytelling that sucks a scroller in.

The plot is recognizable, it’s a classic rom-com setup, but the specificity of the dates and tribulations of modern romance make it fresh and funny. The sound design was particularly well-suited for microdrama, with flourishes and swelling scores that would feel campy in a TV show or movie, but keep the vertical viewer locked in.

Nuuly’s campaign is perfectly attuned to its target audience. The plot directly speaks to one of the primary needs they address: formal attire rental. But they’re able to naturally fold in their other clothing rental options under the guise of a classic rom-com makeover. Wally is the hero of the story, but is also an example of their target demographic.

That customer is also likely to be engaged by a well made rom-com that they stumble upon while scrolling. Particularly with a first episode that starts in media res with a lot of energy and eye-catching editing.

Overall, the series does a great job of utilizing talented artists who are familiar with digital storytelling to produce a sweet, funny romantic comedy that organically promotes Nuuly’s brand and offerings. It’s also one of the stronger romantic comedy microseries that I’ve seen, but I think there are a few things that could’ve pushed it above and beyond current expectations of microdramas.

The script is fun and current, however the characters are missing some heart. Wally seeks romance as a solution to a problem proposed by a friend, not necessarily out of her own desire for a relationship. Her happily ever after lands more like a task being crossed off of a list than a hard won true love.

Wally and David are childhood friends and roommates who have been secretly harboring feelings for each for years. This is revealed in the penultimate episode with a bro-y shove and a laugh before we’re quickly ushered into the finale. Microdramas rely on quick pacing, but if there’s ever a moment to take a little more time, it’s in the climax. By that point, the audience is locked in and wants to share in the main characters’ catharsis.

There’s a reason why the sweeping “run to the airport” scene has become so iconic. It’s usually a long sequence of traffic and blocking, but the audience laps it up because it’s crescendoing to what they’ve been waiting for.

The audience is clued into David’s feelings in the first episode with onscreen text that informs the viewer he “definitely doesn’t have a crush on Wally”. Unfortunately, that’s about all we learn about David’s interior life. An obstacle never appears between him and Wally, so there’s nothing for him to overcome leading up to his admission.

On the other hand, the audience doesn’t get any signs that Wally is withholding her feelings. Her dates are all terrible on their own accord, not because of her own conflicted desires. This causes the story to suffer from a common rom-com issue in which any other possible suitor is so awful that the only course of romantic survival is for the main character to choose the story’s love interest. I find that particular plot device can cheapen the romance and kill the stakes of the climactic moment.

I’m aware that there was likely some pressure from production to keep the project under a certain time constraint. But it’s worth considering that details like these can take a microseries from being something a viewer stumbled upon and enjoyed to being a show that they share with friends and return to over and over again.

Also, a lot of these details could’ve been portrayed without adding much to the run time. Wally mentions on a date that she’s an art teacher and we see that she has two roommates, and yet their home is a pristine rental property. We could get a glimpse into Wally’s interior world through her artwork if it took up space in their home. A few cutaways to her working on a piece could be incredibly informative of her feelings.

Her relationship with David could be emphasized by photos of the two of them growing up or pairs of matching memories: diplomas, ticket stubs, souvenir shot glasses. We could also learn more about David if his decor clearly contrasts Wally’s. Maybe his personal items disappear from their shared space as she continues to go on these dates. A vertical viewer isn’t sitting across the room from their screen, it’s inches from their face. Small details can pack a punch in a small frame.

Heart On My Sleeve is a great microseries to take some time to watch. They’re doing a lot of things really well with this project, and it can inspire you to think of what could be possible with the format.

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: Jo Hoch

Subscribe now

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, the sitcom isn’t dead, it’s just waiting to be reborn as a microseries, Variety wonders if microdramas could save Hollywood, and Scott reviews a review of James’ Franco’s microdrama.

So then-

Let’s talk about James Franco.

Specifically, let’s talk about Variety’s recent review and analysis of his microseries.

It was critical, yes. It addressed much of the problematic history surrounding Franco, yes. And I’m not interested in minimizing or relitigating any of that.

But there was something else in the article that, as the eternal optimist about this medium, I couldn’t help but notice.

Because if you look at the context of the criticism, I think there’s meaningful evidence of the dramatic shift microseries continue to experience.

The article criticized Franco’s performance and what it perceived as a lack of enthusiasm for the material.

Think about what that criticism implicitly says:

Verticals deserve passionate, talented acting.

The article praised Taye Diggs for fully committing to his role in his recent CandyJar production. I obviously can’t know why Franco made the choices he did in his performance, but my read of the Variety piece was that he wasn’t giving this audience the range and commitment he had demonstrated in some of his previous work.

The premise that a microseries deserves that range and commitment is meaningful.

But there was something even more striking to me.

The article suggested that this microseries might have offered Franco a kind of renaissance with younger audiences had he executed at a high level - that some form of career comeback might have been possible had he embraced the role and committed to it as fully as he had in films like 127 Hours and The Disaster Artist.

To be very clear: whether James Franco deserves redemption, a comeback, or anything else is not my argument here.

What interests me is that one of our industry’s most important publications entertained the premise that a microseries could be the vehicle for it.

That should speak volumes about how the medium is now being perceived.

Had Franco appeared in a used-car commercial, a corporate explainer, or some other artistically disposable piece of material, the idea that he had squandered an opportunity for artistic and commercial reinvention wouldn’t even be part of the conversation.

But here it was.

In Variety.

A microseries was being discussed as a place where meaningful artistic reinvention was possible - even if, in the writer’s estimation, that opportunity was missed.

That speaks volumes to me about where we are.

I don’t want to dissect James Franco’s career and conduct. That’s a conversation where there are people far more qualified and relevant than I.

I simply wanted to highlight something I saw as meaningful:

Microseries are increasingly being discussed the same way we discuss other legitimate artistic and commercial mediums - by publications that cover those mediums at the highest level.

And with the right kind of eyes, I think you can see a glimpse of the future.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Vertical Video Economy Worth $150B, Even Without China – Owl & Co Report

Unless you’re sleeping under a rock you will have seen us cover the Owl and Co analysis that the vertical format biz is now worth $150B. Microdramas are up $1B since last year and are showing growth in subscription platforms.

The boom has tracked along with that of generative AI and I would warn companies against building an AI-centered reputation for microseries. Jesse Whittock notes, “Across the seven leading paid-for apps, series releases rose ‘more than fivefold’ since the second quarter of this year. However, average time spent per new title dropped.” The viewer’s interest is piqued but it must be rewarded with strong storytelling in order to keep them watching.

Can Microdramas Save Hollywood? Why the New Vertical Boom Isn’t Quibi 2.0

Range Media Partners’ Rachel Douglas describes being surprised by the enthusiasm from SNL alum Kenan Thompson in regards to his new vertical series for Range. Verticals are giving writers the opportunity to launch projects that streaming platforms and television won’t take a chance on. That’s the same excitement writers had around Quibi, but now we have a more robust scripted-digital business model in order to take those risks.

Here Michael Schneider points to subscription fees and pre-pandemic roll out as the primary faults of Quibi. The difference now is that most viewers are getting hooked on vertical microdramas from ad-supported platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and more and more are making the jump to subscription services. Additionally, in the post-pandemic landscape, vertical content is part of everyone’s day and the creators that inhabit that content are as familiar to viewers as news anchors and morning show hosts.

As far as saving the industry, the rise of AI-generated characters and stories has stalled the growth, but could serve as a short-lived experiment against human storytelling.

Microdramas Meet CTV: Why Short-Form Vertical Stories Are Becoming a Streaming Ad Format

Microdramas are uniquely positioned to be ad-friendly. Some of the most successful microdrama production companies based in India are prioritizing free ad-supported content because, “It’s shorter, cheaper to produce against, easier to test creatively, and it can be sold at a completion rate that most CTV in-stream formats simply cannot match, because the content itself is engineered around the same compulsion loop that keeps a viewer scrolling in the first place.”

However, advertising within microseries needs to be optimized and researched as its own topic, not simply lumped in with short-form content.

FlareFlow & Europe’s Shorts Strike Four-Title Microdrama Pact

The two microdrama platforms are teaming up to produce four new projects that will push beyond the standard genres of microdramas. As microdramas have become more recognizable as a format, the demand for higher concept stories has been building. The playground of original vertical content has been built and now is the time to start getting creative and experimenting.

Your Next Favorite Sitcom Will Be a Microseries

Legacy media companies and streaming services are dropping the ball on one of America’s favorite genres: the sitcom. Most streaming shows are given less than twelve episodes to prove their concept. Even if the end result shows promise, it can be canned in a merger or a change of leadership. Writing rooms are suffering and there aren’t enough opportunities for young writers to cut their teeth on set.

The setbacks of the sitcom in legacy, could be solved by embracing the genre in microseries.

Here’s why:

Vertical content platforms are willing to take risks on new writers and new faces. The Sundace Lab has launched a digital learning program for writers focusing on micro-series. It makes headline news whenever a traditional media celebrity is starring in a microdrama because so far they’ve been populated almost entirely with fresh faces.

The microseries structure is perfect for comedy and zany plotlines. A one minute episode is a perfect amount of time to build to a great joke, and the plot-based punchlines can one-up each other with each episode.

New audience members are drawn into a microseries by familiar formats and IP. Sitcoms are frequently reinventing popular tropes and plot lines. And something as simple as a group of five 20-something friends in a city is instantly recognizable as a setup for funny antics, heartfelt relationships, and at least one slow burn romance.

The entertainment industry is always talking about watch time. Which platform has the most of it, which creator or project on that platform has the most of it, which advertisers are on that programming is getting most of it. We tell our friends that we feel like we should spend less time watching things and then we spend the next thirty minutes recommending things to watch.

I’ve been meaning to get to the theater for The Odyssey, but I didn’t have time this week so instead I watched all nine episodes of the new Mindy Kaling sitcom, Not Suitable for Work. (You’re on a newsletter about verticals. Clearly I’m a fan of broken-up bingeable content.)

It was an imperfect first season, but had likable characters and the seasoned direction of Kaling. Then on Monday Variety announced that the show was cancelled. Over on TikTok I saw fans complaining that shows just don’t get the time they need to get good anymore. All of the titans of the sitcom format had middling performances in their first nine episodes, with many of them having an entirely skippable first season.

The early audience sticks around for the chemistry between the actors and the ridiculously unfolding plotlines, and then they’re truly rewarded once the show finds its legs. The viewers on vertical content apps are already primed for that kind of devotion.

Why pull the audience away from the platform? A lot of the recent sitcoms are even poaching digital creatives. Jack Martin (Not Suitable for Work), Jack Innanen (FX’s Adults), and Benito Skinner (Prime’s Overcompensating) were all recognizable faces from TikTok.

The talent and the audience is already on the platform, they just need the right story. Instead of getting a measly nine episodes, they would have dozens. That creative team could continue to develop the story and the characters to build an ongoing series. I foresee shows taking a similar path to Chit, building their audience in vertical content on a platform like TikTok and then moving to a horizontal format on a platform like YouTube.

Viewers are willing to devote their time to creators that they’ve built a relationship with. They want to feel the pride of being the early disciples of a great show. I think the next great sitcom writers and actors are on TikTok and YouTube right now. The microseries industry loves new talent and is taking the time to develop it.

The microseries industry is still booming, but also finding its footing. People are tuning in, but it’s up to us to keep them watching. I think the key is a combination of great storytelling and highlighting digital content creators with promising talent.

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: Jo Hoch

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.

We’re doing things a little differently this week.

There has been a lot of good reporting recently about where these worlds are heading, and rather than summarize all of it into oblivion, we thought we’d point you toward the stories we think are worth your time, along with a few thoughts on why.

Consider this your Vertical Bloom reading list.

But first…

Do you feel that?

The gates are opening.

I think the namesake of Open Gardens, where The Vertical Bloom makes its home, is one of the best names Ben Odell could have chosen for this moment.

It speaks to something that has always been one of the best parts of this digital home, this vertical world, this creator economy: the gates have always been a little more open here.

When I worked at MrBeast, I was struck by the prevailing belief that a 17-year-old from Indiana might have just as much value to bring to the room as a seasoned producer from Los Angeles.

When it’s productive in a meeting, I’ll bring up the fact that legacy entertainment does not have the same expansive momentum that digital possesses. I honestly believe that it could. Maybe even that it should.

But it’s also true that wisdom’s a gift and you trade it for youth. That age is an honor, but it’s still not the truth. (Thanks, Ezra Koenig.)

When I think about my experiences in the creator economy, and the members of my team who keep me honest, I’m grateful I’ve been taught to keep an open mind. And I’m grateful Larry King’s words still rattle around in my head, in his booming, breaking baritone:

“Don’t knock the new.”

I sometimes fear that entertainment instills an unfortunate necessity in people: the feeling that you must always appear to know exactly what you’re doing.

And if you have to appear to already know, it becomes very difficult to admit that someone new might know something you don’t.

Thankfully, not everyone succumbs to that.

Every month there are more meetings on my calendar with people from companies that film-school-me dreamed of meeting. Stops on studio lots with showrunners with housekeeping deals, looking at the future and yearning for clarity.

The gates are opening.

And there are so many wonderful people on the other side with so much to share. Knowledge about taste, business acumen, and what is ultimately an incredibly well-guarded, mostly oral tradition: The accumulated knowledge of Hollywood.

We are about to see a lot of eyebrow-raising deals announced across the vertical world and beyond.

The gates are opening.

But what happens once we’re all inside?

There’s a quote I first read printed next to the spiral binding of one of my school notebooks, presumably placed there by some Scholastic employee trying to make a deadline, that has stuck with me ever since. It was attributed to Mark Twain, and apparently there’s actually quite a bit of debate if he actually said it, but it’s a truth for me nonetheless:

“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that. Only the truly great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

The spirit of that quote is part of why I think digital has such expansive momentum.

We seek to raise each other. We don’t mind when others iterate on our work. We give wisdom freely. And if my experiences have taught me anything, it’s that all ships do indeed rise in the tide.

The gates are opening, and a lot of talented people are going to find themselves staring at each other inside a strange and wonderful world, wondering what to do.

And the answer will always be:

Create.

Courageously.

Together.

Alright, let’s get into it.

What We’re Reading

A $150 Billion Vertical Video Economy. With an Important Asterisk.

Deadline on Owl & Co.’s latest research into the vertical video economy

There’s a big number making the rounds: $150 billion.

Owl & Co. estimates that the global vertical-video economy outside China will generate roughly $150 billion in revenue in 2026, up more than 40% year over year.

But there’s an important distinction: that number represents the entire vertical-video ecosystem, not microdrama alone. Dedicated microdrama apps account for roughly $4 billion of the estimate. If you’d like to hear more about why Owl & Co. are including all verticals in this number, I would encourage you to check out our review of their summit a few months ago.

The research gets even more interesting beyond the headline number. On My Drama, men have grown from just 1.1% of monthly users to more than 30% in seven quarters, while heavy viewers now average 13.1 hours of viewing per week.

Read the Deadline piece here.

DramaBox Is Going Local in Latin America

Deadline: “DramaBox Sets Brazilian Vertical Series From Cimarron & Trio Of Colombian Originals In Latin American Push”

DramaBox is expanding its original production footprint in Latin America, including a Brazilian series with regional production company Cimarrón and three Colombian originals.

As vertical platforms expand globally, localization doesn’t have to mean translating an American series or dubbing an existing hit. Increasingly, it can mean working with established local producers and talent to build stories for those audiences from the beginning.

Read the Deadline story here.

Microdrama May Be One of the Few Parts of Hollywood That’s Growing

Reuters: “Microdramas boom in a shrinking Hollywood as studios chase a TikTok audience”

This one deserves your time.

Reuters took a much broader look at what the growth of microdrama is actually doing to the Hollywood production ecosystem, including the jobs, facilities, investment and new career paths forming around it while much of traditional production remains under pressure.

Research firm Omdia estimates U.S. microdrama revenue will reach $1.5 billion this year and nearly $2 billion next year, while the U.S. monthly audience more than doubled from 26 million in 2024 to 66 million last year.

There is a much bigger conversation here about what vertical production could mean for Hollywood itself, and we don’t want to cram it into three paragraphs.

So for now: read this. We’ll be coming back to it with some deeper thoughts soon.

Read the Reuters story here.

YouTube and Netflix Are Starting to Fight Over Creators

Bloomberg: “YouTube Offers Creators Millions to Not Work With Netflix”

Bloomberg reports that YouTube is discussing multimillion-dollar incentives with major creators in exchange for giving YouTube a period of exclusivity before their programming appears elsewhere, as Netflix continues courting YouTube talent.

Those incentives could include direct financing for programming and participation in major brand deals. At the time of Bloomberg’s reporting, no deals had been finalized.

For years, the creator economy story was largely about creators trying to cross over into Hollywood. Now two of the biggest video platforms in the world may be bidding against each other to keep them.

Read Lucas Shaw’s Bloomberg report here.

WEBTOON Turns Proven Digital IP Into Vertical Video

Variety: “Webtoon Entertainment Dives into Vertical Shorts, Setting ‘Love Bites’ and ‘Maybe Meant to Be’ as Microdramas”

WEBTOON has launched six live-action vertical adaptations of existing webcomics.

That combination is fascinating: digitally proven IP + an existing fandom + vertical adaptation + an existing digital monetization system.

It raises a much bigger question about whether the most natural source material for the next generation of vertical hits may already be sitting inside other digital storytelling ecosystems.

Again, we think there’s enough here for a much bigger conversation. Read the Variety piece now but expect us to be coming back to these ideas in a future Bloom.

Read the Variety story here.

The Sidemen Are Helping Train the Next Generation of Producers

Deadline: “The Sidemen & NFTS Team To Train Next Generation Of Unscripted Producers In UK”

Sidemen Entertainment is partnering with the UK’s National Film and Television School to give students studying unscripted development and production direct experience inside a creator-led entertainment company.

This isn’t just traditional producers going to work for creator companies, or creators being taught how television works. One of the UK’s most established film and television schools is now putting future producers inside a creator-led company as part of their education.

I love this one because it’s such a tangible example of The Great Convergence we always talk about.

Read the Deadline story here.

Sony Wants Someone Who Speaks YouTube

Natalie Jarvey’s Like & Subscribe: “Sony Hiring a $500K YouTube Whisperer”

First, a quick plug: we’re big fans of Natalie Jarvey around here.

If you work anywhere near the creator economy, Like & Subscribe should be in your reading rotation. Natalie consistently surfaces the specific deals, hires and business moves that tell you where this industry is heading, often before they turn into much bigger conversations.

Her latest has a particularly fun one: Sony Pictures is looking for an executive to help the studio better understand and operate on YouTube, with compensation that can reach $500,000.

The same edition also includes scoops on First We Feast building new vertical shows for Instagram and TikTok and Oscar winner Travon Free producing an independent scripted series with YouTube as a potential distribution path.

We’ve written a lot here about Hollywood and the creator economy learning to speak each other’s languages and apparently speaking YouTube is now a half-a-million-dollar skill.

Read Natalie’s full edition of Like & Subscribe here. And while you’re there, subscribe.

The Mole Distributor Is Moving Into Microdrama

Broadcast: “The Mole distributor Primitives moves into microdrama”

Primitives, the international formats distributor behind The Mole and 99 to Beat, is moving into microdrama.

Traditional format distributors entering the market suggests another piece of the established television ecosystem is starting to see vertical not simply as content, but as IP that can be developed, packaged, sold and adapted internationally.

Read the Broadcast story here.

Cuisinart Is Making a Sitcom for Your Feed

Marketing Dive: “Cuisinart caters to thumb-scrolling consumers with short-form series”

Cuisinart has launched its first episodic campaign built specifically for social: a 14-part comedy about a modern home cook whose roommate happens to be a starving artist transported from the Baroque period.

The episodes were designed for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, and importantly, they’re non-linear so viewers can encounter them through an algorithmic feed without needing to start at episode one.

Rather than chopping a traditional campaign into vertical assets, Cuisinart started with the behavior of the audience and built the format around it.

Worth a read if you’re interested in where branded entertainment is heading.

Read the Marketing Dive story here.

That’s it for this week.

Nine stories, several different corners of the industry, and one fairly consistent theme: the boundaries between vertical, creator-led entertainment and the traditional entertainment business are getting harder and harder to find.

And if a few of these stories sound like they deserve an entire Bloom of their own…

We agree.

See you next week.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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 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 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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas 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.

Read more

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas 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—television in the mobile age.

Read more

Read more

Read more